Road Trip Stats: Month 29 – May 2020

When putting together our road trip stats for April, I said that I wasn’t sure if we’d end up being under budget in May because at the time of writing that post I wasn’t sure where we’d be spending the second half of May.

As it turned out, we extended our time in Pueblo, CO at the same Airbnb we were already staying at. If you’d told me at the start of May that this was what we’d end up doing, I’d have assumed we’d go over budget because of the additional accommodation expense seeing as we had to pay for it rather than using hotel points.

Is that what happened or did we somehow manage to stay under budget? Keep reading to find out.

Miles Driven

We started May 2020 with 139,033 miles on the clock. By the end of the month, the odometer reading was 140,120 which means we drove 1,087 miles last month.

I’d predicted that our mileage would be ~650 miles if we stayed in Colorado through June or ~1,200 miles if we started heading back east before the end of the month. Although we extended our time in Pueblo, we left a couple of days before the end of the month to head back east, with Wichita, KS being our first stop for a few weeks. My prediction of 1,200 miles was therefore pretty close to the 1,087 miles we actually drove.

As for June, I’m going to predict that we’ll drive 1,150 miles. We’re staying in Wichita, Kansas for a few weeks, then we’ll be heading on to Cincinnati, Ohio towards the end of the month. That journey is ~775 miles, so I only expect us to drive a few hundred miles more than that in June.

Money Spent

Seeing as our road trip budget is $100 per day, our budget for May was $3,100. After extending our time in Pueblo, I assumed that we’d go over budget due to the additional accommodation expense. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by how things ended up.

Our total spending in June came to $2,751.90 which means we were $348.10 under budget which was a great result. An added bonus of being so far under budget in May is that it pushed us back under budget for the year, so hopefully we can remain there for the rest of 2020.

Our spending was lower than expected because we didn’t spend much on activities during May other than a couple of $9 entry fees for Lake Pueblo State Park. We spent less on eating out compared to normal as we ate most meals at “home” seeing as we had a kitchen in our Airbnb. Our grocery spend of $604.54 seems high, but that likely includes other household expenses that I simply didn’t split out because of them being bought at grocery stores.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending in May…

…along with a chart tracking our spending in 2020 so far.

Looking ahead to our budget for June, I’m fairly confident that we’ll stay under budget again. We’re currently staying in a fairly cheap Airbnb in Wichita which is helpful, although the hotel we’ve booked in Cincinnati is more expensive and so our spending on accommodation is due to be about half of our June budget.

Our gas expenditure should be low though, while our grocery spend will hopefully also be less than the $600 we spent in May. I’d done a large grocery shop when we arrived in Wichita which was allocated to May’s expenses, so that should help June’s figures.

Accommodation Cost

We spent May 1-29 in Pueblo, with the last couple of days of the month in Wichita. As mentioned earlier, we extended our stay in Pueblo which meant we paid for that second part of the stay separately. That portion of our stay was a little more expensive, but still very reasonable overall.

Here’s a breakdown of how much it all cost. We paid for the stays using Airbnb gift cards which I think we’d bought for an average discount of 15%, so that’s been accounted for in the figures below:

May 1-13: Airbnb in Pueblo, CO – $38.31 per night for a total of $459.72.

May 13-29: Airbnb in Pueblo, CO – $48.62 per night for a total of $777.92.

May 29-31: Airbnb in Wichita, KS – $36.40 per night for a total of $109.20.

I clicked through to Airbnb from Acorns before making these reservations, so we should earn ~$25 cashback as Acorns offers 1.8% back in Found Money.

Points Earned

May was a fairly good month for our hotel points balances. We earned quite a few Hilton Honors points thanks to some referral bonuses we earned when referring people to Hilton credit cards, while we earned 40,000 Radisson Rewards points which came from renewing one of our Radisson credit cards. The other points came from spending on various hotel credit cards.

• IHG Rewards Club – 12,071
• Hilton Honors – 118,476
• Marriott Bonvoy – 0
• World of Hyatt – 7,230
• Radisson Rewards – 40,000
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 11,706

Points Redeemed

We haven’t booked any kind of hotel award stays recently, so we didn’t redeem any points in May.

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

Total Points Balances

Seeing as we earned a decent number of points and didn’t redeem any last month, our total points balances increased in May so here’s what those balances were by the end of last month:

• IHG Rewards Club – 693,307
• Hilton Honors – 862,040
• Marriott Bonvoy – 384,956
• World of Hyatt – 132,873
• Radisson Rewards – 241,629
• Choice Privileges – 34,965
• Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 20
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 329,193

Here’s a breakdown of those lists in table format:

Our balances should get another great boost during June. We don’t have any award stays planned and so we shouldn’t end up redeeming points this month. A lot of our credit cards are offering bonused spend at grocery stores, so I’ve been doing some manufactured spending and gift card reselling which is helping us rack up even more points.

Jogging

I mentioned in a recent post that I was going to restart jogging and that I was going to hold myself accountable by sharing my progress in these monthly stats posts.

In that post I said that my plan was to go jogging every other day and increase my distance by 0.25 miles each time. I’ve been pretty consistent with that, only missing a couple of scheduled run days. One of those was because we went out walking/hiking a couple of days in a row and the other was because our journey from Pueblo to Wichita took all day.

I started jogging on May 14 by going 1 mile and by the end of the month I was up to 2.83 miles. I’d expected to be at 3 miles by the end of May, so my progress was fairly consistent.

I’m not convinced my results for June will be so good though. I’ve gone jogging a couple of times since we arrived in Wichita and had found it a little easier than in Pueblo seeing as we’re not at such high altitude. The problem is the heat. It’s due to be 86°-100°F (30°-38°C for fellow Brits) for the next 10 days. It feels oppressively hot with no breeze, so going out jogging in the heat of the day would be a miserable experience. I’ve waited until early evening when there’s a bit more shade along side streets, but that still doesn’t help much.

I’m writing this having taken out Truffles out for a walk at 11pm. It was 85° outside with no breeze, so even walking outside at night time was awful, let alone jogging. I’m therefore thinking I might have to postpone jogging until we get to Cincinnati.

I don’t want to let my couple of weeks of progress exercising go to waste though, so I might try to find some kind of online exercise videos so that I can at least work out with the air conditioning on full blast.

Blog Stats

COVID-19 had a negative impact on our blog traffic in March and April seeing as people weren’t traveling as much. We regained some of our traffic in May which was good to see. Somewhat unsurprisingly, some of our most popular posts were ones where I’d written about hiking trails, waterfalls, etc. because people were looking for more outdoor activities while stuck at home.

Here are some of our blog stats from last month:

• Number of blog posts published – 10
• Page views – 18,854. That’s an 89% increase on April’s page views, so hopefully our traffic continues recovering in the months ahead.

Final Thoughts

May 2020 was a great month stats-wise. We stayed several hundred bucks under budget, boosted our hotel points balances and our website traffic almost doubled compared to the previous month. Hopefully June continues along those lines.