Road Tripping. Again

The Boss Lady was not able to go on our jaunt to St. Louis and Memphis. Somebody has to keep working to pay for all of this running around, you know!?!  As originally planned, we were going to extend our original trip all the way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.  Time and the fact that I was driving solo AND keeping the kids entertained finally intervened and I cut the trip off and headed for home as we left Memphis.

Last week The Boss Lady said  she would like to visit New Orleans.  Road trip #2 was on!

My go to trip planning sited this summer have been Costco.com for rental cars and hotels (Best Western). and google maps for routing.  After about 10 minutes on Costco's travel website, I found a hotel that was in walking distance to most sites that we wanted to check out in NOLA and the nearby railcar system's 3 day passes would get us everywhere else.  Even better, the hotel was less than $110 bucks a night.

Turns out we did REAL good on the hotel room.  Because we only stayed in Best Western hotels on our first trip, we had a voucher for a free night.   Since we had never spent more than $75 on the earlier rooms, I was not sure they would comp us the full value of the room, but a discount would be OK, too.  One of the mistakes we made in traveling to new Orleans was under estimating the cost of parking.  Even our hotel charged $25 a night to park a car on site.

When the hotel comp-ed our room for the first night, they also gave us free parking.  So our total stay for two nights and parking was just over $150.  DEAL!

The biggest mistake we made on this trip was our serious underestimation of the cost of eating.  Sicne that is a big reason to go to NOLA, we knew it wouldn't be free.  We estimated about $40 a meal to eat at family friendly (aka CHEAP) places.  We should have upped that by 50%.  We never even ate at the fancy restaurants where dining for 4 could have been $150 or more.  If I had known we were staying so cheap, we might have gone a little higher-end on one meal.

In the end, we had a blast.  We ate great.  We checked out tons of awesome street artists and we heard a lot of incredible music.



View Larger Map