The Cost of Vacation, Part 1: Adult Beverages

This week, I’ll be sharing various expenditures related to my recent travels to both The Billfold Live and the JoCo Cruise, and how I feel about them.

I spent $285.65 on cruise booze.

This figure represents 27 drinks, 21 of which were purchased for me and six of which were purchased for friends.

It was an eight-day cruise, so you can do the math on that one. It won’t be correct, because I also had drinks purchased for me by friends, but I did average between three and four drinks a night.

(I only got sick once, after two very dirty vodka martinis where the bartender poured the vermouth in, swished it around, and then poured it out.)

Most of my drinks cost around $9 or $10 with tip. A few cost $15. Although I drank my share of gin and tonics, pink wine, frozen mudslides, and the two martinis, I spent most of the week drinking B-52s: Grand Marnier, Baileys, and Kahlua stacked in a rocks glass with ice. (About halfway through the cruise I started asking the bartenders to make me a B-52 variation that used Fireball instead of Grand Marnier. We can probably give this cocktail many different inappropriate names, but if we wanted to steer away from the “burning plane” theme, I would be happy to dub it the Two-Hit Wonder after, of course, “Love Shack” and “Roam.”) [EDIT: Apparently the B-52s had a lot more hits that I never heard on Pop-Up Video or at junior high school dances.]

How do I feel about spending nearly $300 on cruise booze? I mean, I would have been much happier to drink all of those adult beverages for free, but I do not regret any of the experiences I had while spending a week drinking and swapping stories with friends. (I do regret the second martini.) I could probably have gotten away with drinking a little less and having just as much fun — I increased my alcohol consumption by a good 30 percent this year, which wasn’t strictly necessary — but there’s something lovely about being able to sit at a fake British pub or a fake fancypants bar and drink as much as you want without having to worry about it.

Except a little worry, in this case, could have saved me $125 or so. Two $9 drinks a night would have been plenty. If I had thought about it instead of acting straight from my Baileys-soaked heart, I could have easily spent $144, not $285.

But one of the top three reasons I go on the cruise every year is to spend a week not having to think about things. It is the one week I don’t have a list of action items or a workout schedule or a cleaning routine. It’s one of the few times in my life that I actually do get to act “from the heart,” to borrow the metaphor.

And the heart wants what it wants, which is a series of adult beverages while surrounded by friends. Mostly it wants to be surrounded by friends, and the Band On Fire cocktails (ooh, that’s an even better name than the Two-Hit Wonder) are the sweet, sweet liquor icing on the friendship cake.

While I was away, you probably saw Stefanie O’Connell’s Your Friendship Is Above My Pay Grade. There’s an element of that involved in the way we literally closed down the fake British cruise ship pub every night, in that the price of sharing experiences with some of the best people that you know is — as I calculated — $285.65 over eight days. Plus the cruise booking itself, and the flights, and the ride on the roller coaster, and the other expenses that I will share over the course of this week.

Strictly speaking I cannot afford these drinks (or, for that matter, the cruise itself) in the sense of “well, you’ve got debt, and you’d like to save some money this year, and maybe you should think about retirement, and you’d really like to move out of that apartment where you wash your dishes in a bucket.”

But I also can’t afford not to be there. Making friends as an adult is hard. Keeping them is invaluable. I have learned, in my life, that if you’re not there in the room when things happen, the room moves on without you. It’s this combination of finding your people and then finding a way to get in the same room together that is so crucial: if the equation’s wrong on one end, it becomes the party or lunch date you dread because spending time with not-quite-right people is draining; if it’s wrong on the other, well, anyone who’s ever moved or had a child or taken on a new job with long hours knows that friendships shift if the Room of Requirement becomes less available.

And this is a long way around the fact that I spent too much on drinks this year, in that the number makes me uncomfortable to think about and that I am planning to cut back on expenses to offset this cost. (For starters, I am not going to see Fifty Shades of Grey this weekend. Sorry.)

But even though I feel uncomfortable about how much I spent, I’d do it again without even hesitating. This is why I will always have a little bit of a problem managing my money.

And now a quick discussion of tips. Royal Caribbean, as I mentioned earlier, includes all gratuities in its up-front cost, and that goes for bar gratuities as well. Except — no fools they — there’s also a line on the receipt giving us an additional opportunity to tip, which we all took advantage of. (Creative and artsy types tend to be excellent tippers because we’ve been there.)

If I hadn’t done $50.25 in extra tipping, and had only done the tipping Royal Caribbean already added to the tab, I would have spent $235.40 on my drinks. $50.25 turns out to be 21.35 percent of $235.40, which makes me feel reasonably generous — remember, this doesn’t represent a 21 percent tip on the drink, it represents a 21 percent tip on the cost of the drink and the included gratuity.

So all in all: I spent way too much money on adult beverages this past week, but I feel mostly okay about it.

Tomorrow, we’ll check in with how much I spent on modes of transportation, including planes, taxis, and roller coasters.

Photo credit: JD

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.