I read an interesting post written by Rick Steves, discussing the importance of splurging a little even when you’re on a tight travel budget. Rick Steves is somewhat of a travel icon these days, and a very wealthy man who can spend as much or as little on travel as he chooses, but he started traveling as a young backpacker so he knows the meaning of a buck.
I think his post is worth a look and I’m curious how our community “splurges” on travel. Most of us, I believe, travel on a budget with varying degrees of flexibility.
I would agree with Rick that something I like to splurge on is a good meal most nights when traveling. Breakfast is usually included with the room, especially in Europe, and lunches for me are either skipped or a quick snack. I do like to relax at the end of a busy day of walking and visiting museums and be pampered by some fine food and hopefully an engaging waiter. While I mostly stay in “average” hotels, most trips I’ll book a few nights at an upscale place, especially one that is well known or seems interesting, and especially if I’m traveling with my wife.
How do you pamper yourself while traveling?
Well, if the restaurant is offering buttermilk pie on the menu
,it’s time to splurge!
Just as some people plan scaling a peak, or skiing a famous trail or some other peak experience, we always plan a splurge meal or two into our itineraries—especially in cities like Paris and Bologna that are especially famed for food.
On the one hand, the price is sometimes out of our comfort zone (please don’t ask what we spent on our 35th anniversary!), but on the other, we are fairly frugal travelers otherwise, opting for comfortable apartments over luxury hotels, etc. It almost feels as if we’ve earned the splurge.
And when it works out well, you remember it—even taste it—forever.
I’m not a big spender on food, as an example, but I will spend more than my usual on experiences. For instance, I’ve spoken about pictures I see that send me off half-way around the world and sometimes it eases the logistics, in an otherwise difficult journey, by treating one’s self to a bit of pampering along the way. I spoke about it recently in my blog here on Gulangyu Island. Another such splurge was to a restored Chinese merchant’s house I saw one day in my library office in a new issue of Architectural Digest. It was called the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion and is in Penang, a place I’d never heard of before except on menus, and couldn’t stop myself from immediately planning a trip to stay there. I stayed a week, went off for a few days, then returned for another week, and it was worth every penny. It was early days for the enterprise and much of the time I was the only guest.