The Cost of Vacation, Part 2: Transportation

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.

Leaving out the cost of traveling on a cruise ship, which is also bundled up with “eating on a cruise ship” and “sleeping on a cruise ship,” I spent $841.43 on transportation during my 13-day trip to New York, Florida, and back.

Here’s how it broke down:

$584.70 for the flights from SEA-IAH-LGA, EWR-FLL, and FLL-IAH-SEA

$75 for my suitcase to travel with me ($25 each way)

$29.13 for the taxi from LGA to the Pod Hotel

$16.50 in NYC subway tickets

$12.50 in NJ Transit tickets to get to EWR

$20 for the taxi from FLL to the Hilton Marina (the taxi’s meter was broken, so we agreed that $20 was fair)

$10 for a shared taxi from the Hilton to the cruise ship

$12.10 for a taxi to get from the cruise ship to the Hyatt (a few of us elected to spend the day hanging out at the Hyatt pool after the cruise instead of sitting at the airport for 7 hours, which was the best decision we made on the entire trip)

$4 for a shared taxi from the Hyatt to FLL, in a “sad wad of cash” that I fished out of my purse when I realized the taxi didn’t take credit cards

$51.75 for the taxi from SEA to my apartment

And $25.75 for the Dragon’s Tail Roller Coaster

I feel pretty badly about only coming up with $4 for the second shared taxi. I hate being the person who knows that she ought to pay a full $10 but only has $4 in her purse because she was banking on there being a credit card swipe.

As for the rest of it — well, honestly, what can you do?

I probably spent a little more on NYC subway tickets than I should have, mostly because I didn’t know how much the subway cost and couldn’t plan my trips down to the last dollar.

I took the Seattle Light Rail from my apartment to the airport at the start of the trip, but paid for a taxi on the way back because we landed around midnight, which felt like 3 a.m. after two weeks on Eastern Time, and I was not up for trying to catch the last train out of the airport and then walk my 48-pound suitcase the mile back to my apartment. This is the sort of payment that I assure myself must be a tax deduction. At least half of these costs count as tax deductions, right? (I need to make an appointment with my CPA this week. Consider it my Do One Thing even though it is only Tuesday.)

But here’s the real lesson of my transportation story:

As I was waiting in line to disembark from the cruise ship, I was texting a friend re: what are the haps and he was all we’re going to the Hyatt for the afternoon, nobody wants to sit in an airport all day.

And I, having recently come to terms with the fact that I had spent $285.65 on cruise booze, stood in that disembarkation line and did the math.

If I went to the Hyatt, I’d have to pay for two taxi rides instead of one.

If I went to the airport, I’d have to pay for airport food.

If I went to the Hyatt, I might have to pay just as much for food because I don’t know what the food costs there.

If I went to the airport, it has free Wi-Fi and I might be able to get some work done.

If I went to the Hyatt, I could spend the afternoon sitting on a deck chair by the pool.

At the very last second I picked the Hyatt, even though I felt like going straight to the airport would be the sensible, “I will probably save $20” choice.

Turns out that going to the Hyatt was the better decision and it was the less expensive decision, and doing all the math in the world wouldn’t have told me that I would get a literal free lunch that afternoon or that I would end up saving money by sharing a taxi back to the airport. (Also, the Hyatt had free Wi-Fi.)

I guess that the moral of this story is “Pick friendship, not stinginess.” It’s such a hard balance to walk, because agreeing to spend the extra $20 today adds up if you spend the extra $20 every weekend, or if you buy that third drink every night.

I also agreed to spend the extra $20 (technically, $25.75) to ride the Dragon’s Tail Roller Coaster with a friend, which I don’t regret for a second because I love rides, but $25.75 is a lot of money for a three-minute roller coaster. It’s probably the most money I spent, per distance traveled, over the entire trip.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at why I paid a cruise ship for a bottle of what is apparently my new signature fragrance, Katy Perry’s Killer Queen. (If you are looking for stories about What Happened On The Cruise, that’s all part of tomorrow’s piece too.)

Photo credit: Nicola Romagna

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