Road Trip Stats: Month 21 – September 2019

When putting together our stats for last month, I said that I was hopeful that we’d manage to stay under budget during September, but that I’d had my hopes dashed before.

Well, dashed they were again!

It was all going so well, but then a couple of unexpected expenses came along to push us over budget. It certainly wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, but it’s disappointing that we didn’t manage to stay under as it was initially looking positive. Read on to find out what happened.

Miles Driven

Our car began September with 122,594 miles on the clock. By the end of the month it had 124,706 miles showing, so we drove 2,112 miles in September. My prediction had been that we’d drive 1,900 miles, so I wasn’t too far off.

My prediction for October’s mileage is a little harder to come up with. That’s because I’m away for a couple of weeks for 40k To Far Away, so it’ll partly depend on what Shae gets up to while I’m away. We’re then driving from Portsmouth VA to West Virginia and will likely be visiting quite a few places while in WV.

I’m going to stick with the same guess from last month though – 1,900 miles. It looks like it’s only ~325 miles from Portsmouth to where we’ll initially be staying in West Virginia, so it’s not as far as I originally thought.

Money Spent

I already gave away earlier that we went over budget during September. Our daily budget for the road trip is $100, so with 30 days in September our monthly budget was $3,000. By the end of the month we’d spent $3,304.21, so we were $304.21 over budget.

There are two main reasons we went over budget – me and Truffles. I dropped my phone while hiking up to McAfee Knob and smashed the camera lens. It cost $106 to fix which was much cheaper than having to get a new phone, but it was $106 more than we’d anticipated spending.

And then there’s Truffles. We were staying with Shae’s parents and they have a couple of cats. We keep Truffles and the kitties separated when staying with them because Truffles goes nuts at them. Well, she caught a glimpse of one of them and leapt off the couch to chase him.

After she’d finally calmed down, she disappeared for a while. I’d thought she was just snoozing somewhere, but I found her under a desk looking like she was in pain. Sure enough, she was having a hard time walking. Concerned that she might’ve done some damage, I took her to the vet and she was prescribed some pain meds.

A week passed and she was still having issues, despite the fact that we had effectively forced her on bed rest. Her hind left leg was still kind of lame – it would just give out on her at times. Concerned that a week had passed and she was still having issues, I took her back to the vet.

Thankfully there wasn’t anything seriously wrong – it certainly wasn’t broken. The vet just recommended we continue having her rest up and she prescribed some more pain meds in the meantime. These two vet visits plus pain meds cost a couple of hundred bucks though which accounted for the rest of our overspend. All because Truffles probably landed badly when jumping off the couch to chase a cat.

Here’s a breakdown of all our spending from last month…

…as well as a bar chart showing our spending for the year so far. Unfortunately going over budget last month means we’re now over budget for the year.

As for our budget for October, it’s shaping up to be OK. Then again, I thought September’s was too and look what happened. Still, I’m away for the first two weeks of the month and Shae’s staying with her parents, so that means our accommodation costs won’t be as high. With me not around, our food costs shouldn’t be as high either, unless me not being around to make dinner means Shae ends up eating out more 😉

I’m feeling optimistic though and would love it if we could be under budget by $210 or more as that would put us back under budget for the year overall.

Points Earned

We didn’t have many paid stays during September, so didn’t make too many additions to our points balances. Hyatt was the only one that had a decent number of points added; 15,000 were transferred in from my Chase Ultimate Rewards account, so they weren’t earned per se. ~5,000 came from our stay at the Hyatt Place Roanoke, while I also earned 10,000 bonus points for hitting 70 nights so far this year with Hyatt.

Here’s a list of all the points we earned:

• IHG Rewards Club – 9,023
• Hilton Honors – 2,780
• Marriott Bonvoy – 5,680
• World of Hyatt – 30,288
• Radisson Rewards – 510
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 5,639

Points Redeemed

We redeemed significantly more hotel points than we earned last month. Some of those were for stays during September, while others were for upcoming stays during this month.

• IHG Rewards Club – 0
• Hilton Honors – 124,000
• Marriott Bonvoy – 60,000
• World of Hyatt – 15,000
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 15,000

Total Points Balances

Taking into account all the points we earned and redeemed, here’s what our total points balances looked like at the end of September:

• IHG Rewards Club – 454,590
• Hilton Honors – 707,874
• Marriott Bonvoy – 360,335
• World of Hyatt – 28,219
• Radisson Rewards – 314,750
• Choice Privileges – 26,226
• Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 15
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 271,719

As always, here’s that information in table format for those that prefer it presented that way:

Blog Stats

Here’s a little more information about how our site got on last month:

• Number of blog posts published – 20
• Page views – 30,135

Final Thoughts

Carelessness by both me and Truffles cost our budget dearly last month. Let’s just hope I can be less clumsy and Truffles less angsty about cats this month so that we can actually stay under budget!