How I Will Plan My Next Family Vacation

This year we stayed in the great state of Florida for our vacation, but next year we plan no taking a trip from the Sunshine State to Virginia to visit my sister, her husband and their kids. This trip will serve as our family vacation as we plan on taking a full week. This means some downtime to fill as we won't spend every day with my sister. So, the planning and the saving for our next family vacation begin now.

We could fly, but I don't like to unless it is absolutely necessary so instead we will be driving our car up. In order to determine how far the trip is I simply used Google maps and came up with the numbers.

The trip will take us a little over 1,600 miles round trip so gas wise we are looking at around $185 in assuming our car gets an average of 30 miles to the gallon on the surface streets and highways and that gas stays near $3.50 per gallon. Add to that expense five nights at a hotel at around $100 per night. This I will, of course, check through an online website such as Hotels.com or Priceline.com, but this is typical of what we pay for hotels when we are out and about. This means that the total before food and entertainment will be around $685.

I have already looked at things to do in Virginia by checking out one of the state's official websites Virginia.org. After looking around, we decided to take a couple days and visit Busch Gardens as we already frequent the park in Tampa, Florida where we hold year passes, but have never been to the sister park in Virginia.

For this I have factored in an additional $300 for park tickets and fuel. That brings the new grand total to around $985 before food so, we will likely have a great time and eat well if we save around $1,500 for the week long trip.

To save this money we have already opened a special bank account designated the 'vacation fund.' This fund gets around three percent of our total income each week and if we get any kind of windfall money, such as birthday money, we will put a little of that away as well. This might also mean that we have to cut back on a few extras, like going out to dinner less often, but the week-long trip will be the coveted prize that we keep our eye on.