Well, I didn't think we could do it. My Fiancee suggested before our trip to Orlando, "Let's set a food budget of fifty bucks a day." I agreed, but inside I was skeptical. After all, we were planning on spending several days in Disney and Universal theme parks. Aren't the burgers like nine bucks there?
Well, I'm happy to report that we not only kept our total combined food budget under fifty dollars a day, but we almost made forty dollars a day! Not only that, but we didn't hold back. We ate out, I had beers at EPCOT's World Pavilion, wine or beer with a few other meals. So, how the heck did we do it? I'm still not sure I know, but basically, it's like this...
The biggest load was taken off of our budget by virtually eliminating our breakfast and lunch budgets. Taking the advice of several commenters to my pre-Orlando post, we made a run to the grocery store and loaded up the fridge. We bought milk and cereal, some muffins, bottled water, granola bars, a loaf of bread, lunch meats, a small jar of deli mustard, and yogurt. When we were at restaurants, we took home the little single serving packs of jams and butter for the morning. Our room at the Hilton actually had a toaster and microwave as well as a fridge.
And yes, the cost of those groceries was included in our budget. But we spent about twenty bucks on all this stuff, and it was breakfast and lunch almost every day for ten days. We brought sandwiches, granola bars and water to the park. The only exception was when we went to EPCOT and had lunch at the Moroccan place in the World Pavilion.
A couple of exceptions helped us, but also worked against us. We were there for her brother's wedding. So, there were three meals that we didn't pay for. One was the rehearsal lunch, there was the wedding dinner, and he treated close family to a special dinner after the wedding. On the other hand, we went out to dinner with a bunch of her relatives one night and ended up at Fulton's Crab House, probably the most expensive restaurant in Downtown Disney. We certainly didn't get the surf n' turf, but still ended up spending about eighty bucks between the two of us for that one meal. The other was an outing with her relatives to Kennedy Space Center. We took a detour to Cocoa Beach for dinner. We spent almost our whole day's allowance on that meal. Those were two costlier meals that we wouldn't have gone to if we were not traveling with others.
In the end, we spent just over forty bucks a day for food. In the future, we will definitely look for hotels with fridges. Next time we travel (unless it's our honeymoon), we are going to try to do $40 a day for two.
How did you do it? I mean eating dinner out with a beer is $30 at a place unless you don't tip? Can you write what you spent at eat restaurant?
Posted by: LivingAlmostLarge | March 01, 2007 at 05:51 PM