Posted on August 24, 2008 8 Comments

We got back from our vacation to Washington state’s San Juan Islands and Olympic National Park on Monday and had a fantastic time. Here’s a little slideshow I put together with our best pictures. To see the captions with descriptions, just roll your cursor over the pic as it slides by. The pics are also up on my Facebook page.

We’ve been dreaming of this trip for the last few years, but in reality the planning became a last-minute affair. As you guys know, we were waiting for airline prices to come down – three months ago, the cost to fly into Seattle was more than $700, the same as a flight to Costa Rica! We couldn’t justify spending $300 more per ticket than estimated, so we kept a back-up trip to the Apostle Islands, WI, ready to be planned. But in mid-July, ticket prices to Seattle came down to about $400 per ticket (on Southwest) and we booked flights.

At that point, we didn’t realize how expensive lodging would be for last-minute booking. We usually travel in the shoulder season, when you can get hotel rooms for just about anywhere on the west coast for around $100/night, but given B’s law school schedule we had to travel in August — peak season — and ended up paying between $100 and $200 per night for rooms per night. I know we could have found cheaper places, but I travel so much for work that the thought of spending my vacation time in a shabby motel room wasn’t appealing at all.

Our itinerary for the trip put more than 900 miles on the rental car, and allowed us to see some of the most beautiful and diverse scenery on the west coast – we visited mountains, islands, rain forests, beaches, trails and parks. We traveled by air, by car and by ferry to hike, kayak and relax. We spent time in Seattle, Renton, Mount Vernon, Anacortes, San Juan Island, Orcas Island, Lopez Island, Port Angeles, Olympic National Park, La Push and Neah Bay. We were happily exhausted by the end of it – as usual we did too much with our free time – but were able to rest assured knowing that our hard-earned money and vacation time were well spent.

For a general idea of how much our trip cost, I’ve posted some of the expenses below. Remember that everything was split by two, so I paid about half of what is listed here, and that this is peak season. If you’re planning a trip out there and can go in late-Sept or October, you can probably save hundreds of dollars. This was one of our more expensive trips, and I don’t know that we’d do it exactly the same, but for what it’s worth, here’s the breakdown:

Airfare (2 people): $922

Lodging (8 nights): $1,273.70 (averages out to $159-ish per night)

Car (7 days, plus a pre-bought tank of gas): $276.30 (we had a $300 gift certificate on top of this)

Food: This is kind of hard to gauge. Our breakfast was included with most of our hotels, so I’ll exclude those costs and factor those in with lodging. We also did a lot of grocery shopping for snacks, drinks, beer, wine, etc., to keep at our B&Bs/hotel rooms. We generally got sandwiches to-go from delis and grocery stores along the way and ate on hikes, in the car or on the ferry, so I’d say lunch was about $20/day for both of us. Dinner probably averaged out to around $50/meal, including drinks, but there were a few fast-food nights because by the time we got back from our trips to Olympic Park, most of the food places in Port Angeles were closed. So I’d say $20/day for lunch and $50/day for dinner, which averages out to $560 for 8 days on the trip.

I also had some incidental costs: I spent about $177 on gear for the trip (shoes, binoculars, sunglasses), and about $150 on art and gifts while we were there (I’m becoming a big fan of native american art).

Then, a few additional costs: I think we spent about $60 for the Ferry (multiple trips), several additional tanks of gas, we definitely stopped for drinks at brewpubs is many towns and we spent about $200 to kayak for two days (one was a very expensive guided tour, the other was a very cheap kayak rental with no guide).

I recognize that this is not a trip everyone can afford to take, and that we were blessed to be able to afford the getaway this year. Neither B nor I had the luxury of taking these kinds of trips growing up… for me, part of a family of six, there were too many of us to frequently travel cross country and incur the expenses that come with it. But I was lucky to have parents who gave me the gifts of appreciation for the outdoors, a sense of adventure and a zest for life learned during an action-packed childhood of midwest road trips, local camping weekends, visits to family in neighboring states and infrequent trips with aunts, uncles and cousins to then exotic and far-away states, including Florida, Idaho and California.

For us, there’s something special about getting away from our familiar city-centric lives, away from the daily grind, into the fresh air and open spaces of the outdoors. We value the experiences spent in these magical windswept places of wild beauty, and keep them in our memories to fuel our daily lives. Who knows if we’ll stay in Chicago forever; our hearts are definitely in the west, but our extended families and jobs are here, as is B’s education. Therefore, we’re here for at least the next four of five years. So for now, we’ll keep our experiences as pictures in our mind as we close out the Summer and move into a busy Fall.

I hope your summer vacations were as good as all mine were (Houston, Nevada, Michigan, Lake Geneva and Washington), and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my summer travel adventures. Send me links to your pictures and trips so we can all start planning our ideas for next summer!

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I'm a working girl on a budget. Follow my journey from chronic overspender to power saver!

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