Road Trip Stats: Month 38 – Feb 2021

February came and went particularly quickly. I guess that’s to be expected seeing as it’s the shortest month, but it doesn’t feel like that long ago that we were in Austin, TX.

Half of last month was spent in self-quarantine or being snowed in, so that had an impact on how much we drove and what we spent. With more than half our budget being allocated to accommodation costs though, would we still end up going over budget? Read on to find out about our budget and the rest of our stats from February 2021.

Miles Driven

February began with our car’s odometer reading at 152,203 miles while by the end of the month its reading was 152,951. That means we drove a total of 748 miles in February. That’s particularly pleasing because last month I predicted that we’d drive 750 miles, so I think that’s the closest my monthly mileage prediction has ever been!

I’ve got no clue how much we’ll be driving in March though. We’re leaving our Airbnb in two days and don’t have anything booked yet which is unusual for us as in the past we’d normally have everything booked 4-6 weeks ahead of time.

We have a general idea of where we’ll be staying – we just don’t know in what order yet. It’ll all be within New Mexico though, so that’ll limit how much driving we end up doing. I’m going to guess we’ll drive 1,050 miles, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that ends up being closer to 850 miles by the end of March.

Money Spent

With 28 days in February and a daily budget of $100, our total budget for last month was $2,800. By the end of the month we’d spent $2,779.79 which means we managed to stay $20.21 under budget.

That’s a solid result considering our accommodation came to almost $1,500, so more than half our budget. That’s because all of February was spent in Airbnbs rather than hotels paid for using points. At an average cost of $53.27 per night, that’s still a decent price but it did mean we had to be careful with our other spending. The amount we spent on eating out was less than average, but that was balanced by us spending a bit more on groceries.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending for last month…

…and here’s a chart tracking our spending so far in 2021.

Looking ahead to our budget for March, I have no clue how it’ll turn out. With us not having any of our accommodation booked beyond March 8, I don’t know how much of our spending will end up being allocated to that. I’ve a feeling we’ll be doing a few more paid-for activities in the coming weeks at museums and places like that, so there’s a chance we’ll end up going over budget.

Accommodation Cost

This section is a little easier to cover for last month as we only stayed in two different places, both of which were Airbnbs.

February 1-22: Airbnb in Bloomfield, NM. It cost $63.64 per night including fees, but we paid for it with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount which reduced that average nightly cost to $53.07 per night.

February 22-28: Airbnb in Los Alamos, NM. This was a similar price to our Airbnb in Bloomfield as it cost $61.56 per night including fees. We once again paid for it with discounted Airbnb gift cards which reduced its cost to $53.86 per night.

You might have noticed that the original price for the Los Alamos property was cheaper than the Bloomfield one, but our net cost for Los Alamos ended up being higher. That’s because we’d gotten a larger discount on the gift cards for the Bloomfield property than the Los Alamos one.

Hotel Points Earned

With us staying in Airbnbs all of February, we didn’t earn any hotel points from stays. However, we did earn points in a few programs thanks to spending on our hotel credit cards, along with a credit card referral bonus on one of our Hilton cards.

• IHG Rewards – 3,658
• Hilton Honors – 22,580
• Marriott Bonvoy – 234
• World of Hyatt – 3,406
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 21,017
• Capital One – 4,140

Hotel Points Redeemed

We didn’t need to redeem any hotel points for our stays in February and, with us not having anything booked for the rest of March yet, this section is zeros across the board.

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

Total Hotel Points Balances

Even though we didn’t earn many hotel points in February, our balances still ended up higher by the end of the month thanks to us not redeeming any points whatsoever. Here’s our final tally for last month:

• IHG Rewards – 476,469
• Hilton Honors – 797,069
• Marriott Bonvoy – 725,425
• World of Hyatt – 178,702
• Radisson Rewards – 277,842
• Choice Privileges – 38,645
• Wyndham Rewards – 120,577
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 520,594
• Capital One – 71,720

Here’s a table with all our points information for those who prefer reading it this way:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

The number of hotel free night certificates Shae and I have on our accounts has increased since last month too. We have extra IHG and Marriott certificates due to a couple of credit cards renewing, plus we have two new Hyatt certificates earned as Milestone Rewards due to the number of elite night credits we’ve earned this year.

• IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 4
• Hilton (any property worldwide) – 3
• Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 11
• Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 2
• Hyatt (category 1-4) – 4
• Hyatt (category 1-7) – 2

Walking

Two weeks of self-quarantine and a few days of snow meant that I didn’t walk anywhere near as much as I would’ve liked to. The last week or so of February involved more hiking and exploring though, so it was nice to get out and about. I didn’t track how much I walked last month though.

March is looking like a much better month for walking. I’ve already been on a couple of 5+ mile hikes, we’re going hiking again today and there should be plenty of other hiking opportunities throughout the rest of the month while we’re still in New Mexico. I’m also hoping I’ll be motivated enough to take Truffles on longer walks on non-hike days, so we’ll see how that turns out.

Blog Stats

I wrote a post at the end of January about our decision making when it came to whether or not to self-quarantine for two weeks in New Mexico or visit a different state instead. That post seemed to get a lot of people reading it last month, so I think it must’ve ranked fairly well in Google when people were searching about New Mexico’s self-quarantine rules. I’ve no idea what search terms were bringing people to that post though because Google Analytics doesn’t provide much info on that front anymore and when doing a few searches for myself, I didn’t see our post showing up on the first page, so who knows.

Anyway, here are a couple of stats about last month’s readership:

• Number of blog posts published – 7
• Page views – 23,524

Final Thoughts

Looking over February’s stats, there’s very little that was noteworthy which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We were marginally under budget, didn’t drive too much, earned a few hotel points, etc. It’ll be interesting to see if March follows the same pattern or if there’ll be a few more extremes.