Violet Sky

Oddly, I was less motivated to do this accounting. Sure, I had gone through Monarch already and categorized everything as Travel, and I had even created the tab for this account in my vacation expenses spreadsheet before we took the trip, but something about this was less interesting than our Ireland trip. Maybe because that was our first trans-Atlantic international kid-free vacation and this was another family vacation. Maybe also because every time we take a vacation as a family, the inevitable answer to, “How much did it cost?” is, “A lot,” and putting a specific number on that, rather than a ballpark number rounded neatly to the thousands place, sounded disagreeable. Nonetheless, let’s get into it.

Lodging

Merchant	Expense	Category
Airbnb	$1,207.14	Lodging

This one was easy – we require three beds when we travel as a family, and three beds is almost always prohibitively expensive at hotels, so we looked for an Airbnb. Air conditioning was, as ever, an essential, and oddly, between those two requirements, there were very few options in Québec City for us. Our Airbnb was nice enough, however, and worked for our purposes.

Food

Category	Expense
Airport	$75.95
Alcohol	$74.33
Coffee	$26.21
Grocery	$340.72
Minimart	$60.23
Restaurant	$1,926.52
Total	$2,503.96

Our airport food costs were kept artificially low by the meal vouchers we got from Air Canada as an apology for canceling our return flight and leaving us hanging out in the airport for several hours. It could have been even cheaper if I had remembered to use the remaining vouchers on our layover in Toronto, but we barely had enough time to get to our gate and, in the frenzy of trying to find something that each of us (with our varying dietary restrictions) could eat, I totally forgot to use the second tranche of them during our layover. It certainly could have been worse, however.

Ever since our trip to Italy last year, where my husband and I fell in love with the quick sips of espresso at the bar, we’ve carried a Moka pot and some pre-ground espresso beans on vacations where we have a kitchen available. This was particularly useful on this trip, where the nearest coffee was back up the hill.

But of course, as usual, the biggest food expense was eating at restaurants. Québec City was not particularly cheap, probably in part because we were next to the most touristy part of the city. This was compounded by our delicious but expensive visit to Taniere³ ($658.38) and the fact that our youngest has never met a steak meal he wasn’t willing to eat. The groceries were primarily snack food, beer, and breakfast items, with some miscellaneous easily prepared items for the times when one or more of the kids stayed back at the Airbnb while we went out.

Transportation

Category	Expense
Airfare	$1,924.91
Rideshare	$387.07
Total	$2,311.98

The original price of our airfare was $1,718.92, but once you added in seat selection for my husband (the rest of us were fine rolling the dice, but he’s quite a bit broader in the shoulder than the rest of us) and checking the two large bags we brought, it was a bit over $2,000 for airfare related items. We got some of the seat selection money back thanks to the canceled flight.

The rideshare numbers make me cringe, however. We investigated the bus system and probably could have leaned on it a bit more than we did – it was $10 per person per day for a day pass, which was often a little bit more than an Uber ride, and we would have had to hike up to the station that sold the passes to get them, but ultimately it was laziness that cost us almost $400 over 8 days. Something to think about for next time.

Entertainment

Merchant	Expense
Mega Parc	$94.74
Musée Royal 22e Régiment	$45.24
Cicerone Tours	$197.17
Apikol	$63.40
Total	$400.55

With the exception of the food tour, our entertainment was well worth the money. I wouldn’t pay almost USD$200 for the Cicerone tours again, but I’m not particularly mad that I did since it wasn’t totally unredeemable. Apikol and the Citadel tour were both more up my alley and also quite affordable, and $100 for unlimited rides at an indoor amusement park is definitely worth the money.

Miscellaneous

Category	Expense
Shopping	$452.64
Fee	$2.82
Withdrawal	$15.91
Total	$471.37

After almost an entire week of walking by the funicular in old Québec, we finally found ourselves near an ATM and withdrew CAD$20 for the next time we found ourselves heading back up the hill. The funicular, whose word pronunciation I had to look up as I realized I had never heard someone say it aloud, was CAD$5 per person, cash only. It was worth doing once but they sardined us in there well enough that I didn’t feel like doing it again. The rest of the shopping was a miscellaneous assortment of necessities, tourism shopping, and buying clothes for my youngest, who managed to bring zero pairs of shorts on a summer trip and thought rolling his sweatpant legs up would be a fine solution.

Summary

Category	Expense
Lodging	$1,207.14
Food	$2,503.96
Transportation	$2,311.98
Entertainment	$400.55
Miscellaneous	$471.37
Total	$6,985.00

How fun for all of that to roll up into a nice, round number! This was a bucket list trip for my husband, a strong point of interest for me, and probably the last international trip we’ll take our youngest child on for a long time (at his request – he does not enjoy traveling like we do) so while it tallied up to quite a bit more than I ideally would have spent, as usual, I’m not sad that we spent well on new experiences for everyone. Yesterday, we booked the start of one of our 2025 trips, so stay tuned.