Where to Go? AKA The Big Ticket Items

 We spend a lot of time planning for each of our trips. I think getting to do the planning is actually part of the fun. But, our first step for each trip is choosing our location. As we decide on our location, we always discuss what will be the Big Ticket Items (BTI) for our budget. These will be slightly different for each location.

To start we make a list of what items we will need to include in the budget for our trip. Then we find out how much these items will cost. Here is a sample list:

Accommodations at our location

Travel to our location

Accommodations while traveling to location

Food on the way to our location

Food at our location

Any miscellaneous new gear for the trip

Any fees we will have for activities

We usually book the big ticket items at least 6 months before we actually take our trip. This is partly because many places need booking that far in advance. But it also is because we want to have the big ticket items paid completely in advance. If we don't have enough money for the booking, we have to rethink our plans and modify. Which might mean choosing a new location for travels or it might mean we need to find a way to make one of the big items cheaper. 

We do not always need exact figures, but close enough to figure out our BTIs. For example, our trip to Iceland, our BTIs were accommodations at our location and travel to our location. We were pretty sure that we did not want to change our location, so we did shopping around and reading up on different ways to keep accommodation costs down. Which resulted in doing a campervan rather than hotels or house rentals. This made our trip WAY more affordable. We did our booking of flights and the campervan in November which was seven months before our trip. We only booked it because we had enough cash to pay for the BTIs in November. Other trips our BTIs are MUCH less than our Iceland trip so we don't have to save up as much, but it is still essential that we plan our travels around those BTIs. Often when we do tent camping, accommodation at our location is not even one of the BTIs.

Here is a quick overview of how this has worked with some of our trips:

Grand Tetons 2021 - BTIs were travel to our location and accommodations while travelling to our location

Yellowstone in 2020 - BTIs were travel to our location and accommodations while travelling to our location

Glacier in 2019 - BTIs were travelling to our location. But, this was slightly misleading because we had to take a detour to Winnipeg for a conference.

Maine in 2018 - BTIs were accommodations in Maine and travel to Maine

I could go farther back, but I think you get the idea. One explanation, though. We have slashed restaurants out of our budget a LONG time ago. Before we had kids we decided that restaurants were not going to be a part of our travel budget. Instead we always find accommodations which allow us to do our own cooking. This is one of the main reasons we can travel. We have to feed our family no matter where we are, so grocery shopping is part of our regular family budget. I am pretty sure that if we did restaurants, our food would quickly end up being a BTI. This is not to say that don't ever eat out. We probably eat out 2 times a month in our regular routine. So, it is not going to mess up our budget too much if we eat our 2-3 times on one of our trips. But, we do usually have to eat out while we are travelling to our destination, which is why we always need to include that as a line item for planning. 

Now that we have done this type of planning a few times, we actually don't need to spend as much time as we once did. It does not mean we do not do the step in our planning, it just means it is such an integral step and we have done it enough that it is becoming second nature for us to figure out the BTI for each trip.