The financials of this trip are a little different than previous trips, since I had a medical event during the trip and also the purpose was celebrating my friend’s birthday. I ended up deciding to exclude the medical and celebratory costs from the vacation spending, since they fall outside normal vacation behavior for me, but the actual spending from this weekend was a touch higher than shows here.
Lodging
| Merchant | Expense | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Hilton | $435.16 | Lodging |
This location and hotel was nothing special, but then again, almost nothing that I looked at within the price point I wanted to pay was, so the Dearborn location won out solely to get us a little further west of Detroit, given that my friend lives an hour west. I prefer Hyatt hotels, but there weren’t very many in this area and Hilton was running a 20% off sale, so their brand won out.
Food
| Category | Expense |
|---|---|
| Airport | $161.83 |
| Alcohol | $91.37 |
| Coffee | $16.22 |
| Groceries | $80.09 |
| Restaurant | $194.82 |
| Total | $544.33 |
As I’m looking at the charges for food, I’m realizing just how much money we ended up spending at airports, despite spending our time in only three of them. Unreal. We did do a trip to Whole Foods to pick up snacks and minor breakfast items, plus the meals we had with my friend for her birthday wasn’t included in these totals, but overall, this feels like normal spending for us, outside of the airport total.
Transportation
| Category | Expense |
|---|---|
| Airfare | $1,751.32 |
| Car rental | $144.79 |
| Parking | $78.99 |
| Rideshare | $84.97 |
| Total | $2,060.07 |
The bulk of the parking charges here were from our car’s time overnight in the economy lot at the Portland Airport, which costs $15/day. I waited a touch too long to buy our tickets to Detroit and back, because I was fretting over times and durations and layovers, so they ended up being more expensive than I hoped. But overall, reasonable travel costs, especially since we were slumming it in economy both ways. 😛
Shopping
| Category | Expense |
|---|---|
| Shopping | $95.64 |
Not much to say here. My husband’s Detroit City FC t-shirt was the most expensive item we bought, at $30, and the rest was mostly airport purchases or miscellaneous.
| Category | Expense |
|---|---|
| Lodging | $435.16 |
| Food | $544.33 |
| Transportation | $2,060.07 |
| Shopping | $95.64 |
| Total | $3,135.20 |
All in all, not a very expensive trip, with the vast majority of the expenses coming from lodging and transportation. We have one more trip coming up this year, to the Dominican Republic, so it’ll be fun to compare two very different types of trips so close together.
Violet Sky 
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