When Shae, Truffles and I set off on our 50 state road trip on January 1, 2018, it was meant to be a 5 year road trip. You don’t have to be great at math to work out that this means that this latest edition of our road trip stats – month 60 – should be our last.
It’s not.
We’re only 30 states in, so we’re extending our road trip to complete the other 20 of them. We’ll be sharing more about those plans in the coming weeks, but for now it’s time to look back at our stats for last month.
When putting together our stats for November, I said that although I anticipated we’d stay under budget in December, it wasn’t likely that we’d be able to underspend to such a degree that we’d be able to stay under budget for the year as a whole, but that there was a slight chance we would.
Did we manage the near-impossible and stay under budget for both the month and the year? Read on to find out.
Miles Driven
We began December 2022 with 190,574 miles on our car’s odometer. At the end of the month its reading was 191,930 which means we drove 1,356 miles last month. I’d predicted we’d drive 1,250 miles, so I wasn’t too far off.
Looking ahead to January’s mileage, it shouldn’t be very high. We’re heading overseas in a few days (more about that in a separate post soon) and we’ll be abroad for about a month. We’ll therefore likely do what we did in the summer when we went to Europe for a month; we’ll combine January’s and February’s stats in one post once we get back, rather than doing a stats post for only a week of January.
When we get back from overseas we’ll be heading to North Carolina for our next state. We’re currently in Virginia and so it won’t be a long drive down there, so I’ll guess that over the course of January and February that we’ll drive 1,750 miles.
Money Spent
We have a budget of $125 for the road trip, so December having 31 days meant we had a budget of $3,875 for the month. By the end of the month we’d spent $3,088.25 which meant we stayed $786.75 under budget
Our budget for the year was $41,812.50 (this is based on us spending some of that time overseas) and we came in at $41,740.43. That’s $72.07 under budget for the year – we did it!
The main reason we were able to stay so far under budget is because only one week of December was spent in hotels being paid for with cash; the rest was booked using points. Now, some of those points we’d bought at a discount, but those purchases had already been accounted for on our budget.
We also spent December working and hanging out with family and friends, so our other expenditure wasn’t very high either.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending for the month…
…along with a chart tracking our spending for the year as a whole.
Accommodation Cost
December 1-4: Hyatt House Sterling/Dulles Airport-North, VA. Shae and I spent the first few days of the month just outside of Washington D.C. and booked this stay using World of Hyatt points (this was a continuation of our stay from the end of November). The property is a category 1 hotel which means it costs 3,500, 5,000 or 6,500 points per night depending on if it’s at off-peak, standard or peak pricing. It was a mix of off-peak and standard pricing during our stay, so our average cost was 3,969 points per night.
December 1 & 3: In addition to that room, we also booked a separate room for Shae the nights of December 1 and December 3 as I’d tested positive for COVID. One night cost us 3,500 World of Hyatt points and the other cost 5,000 points. They were points well spent as she thankfully didn’t catch it from me.
December 2: Waldorf Astoria Washington D.C. We’d planned to visit Washington D.C. together to check out some Smithsonian museums, but me catching COVID put paid to that idea. Rather than having Shae drive between Sterling and downtown, we decided to book a night in D.C. for her. I’d noticed that we had a Hilton free night certificate expiring at the end of February which I wasn’t sure we’d otherwise be able to use, so Shae was able to put it to good use for a free night at the newly branded Waldorf Astoria (formerly the Trump Hotel). The room rate for that night was almost $700, so it was nice that she got to experience that for free courtesy of the Hilton free night certificate.
December 4-11: Candlewood Suites Newport News/Yorktown. Some friends were spending a week visiting the Yorktown/Williamsburg area, so we arranged to stay nearby so that we could meet up with them several times. We stayed at the Candlewood Suites Newport News/Yorktown as they had a fairly reasonable rate for a one bedroom suite – $139.64 per night including tax. That’s more than we normally pay for a hotel, but we wanted some extra space seeing as I was still recovering from COVID (the lack of energy hit me for much longer than I’d expected).
December 11-January 1: Candlewood Suites Virginia Beach Town Center. We then booked a month at the Candlewood Suites Virginia Beach Town Center so that we could be near family and friends over Christmas and the New Year. We’d stayed at this hotel a couple of years beforehand and returned there because it’s a rare IHG property where you can book straight into a one bedroom suite with points. By taking advantage of the 4th night free benefit for IHG Premier credit cardholders and the 10% points rebate on award stays for IHG Select credit cardholders, our net cost was only 11,745 IHG One Rewards points per night.
We’d bought those points for 0.5cpp (cents per point), so each night effectively cost us $58.73 per night – much cheaper than the $127.35 per night we’d have been charged if paying cash.
Hotel Points Earned
We “earned” quite a lot of hotel points in December, although the reality isn’t as exciting as it might look in some cases. We cancelled a couple of IHG stays booked with points, so that’s where a lot of the 122,945 IHG One Rewards points came from.
50,000 of the Hyatt points were transferred to us from Shae’s mom as we’d booked a stay for them a while ago using our own points, so this was them repaying us as Hyatt lets you transfer points between accounts for free.
- IHG One Rewards – 122,945
- Hilton Honors – 1,030
- Marriott Bonvoy – 13,655
- World of Hyatt – 51,779
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 27,132
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 41,682
- Capital One – 0
Hotel Points Redeemed
We redeemed very few points in December. 8,500 of them were to book two nights at the Hyatt House for Shae while I was sick, with the other 90 points being points taken back after getting a refund on a purchase on my World of Hyatt credit card.
- IHG One Rewards – 0
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Bonvoy – 0
- World of Hyatt – 8,590
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
- Capital One – 0
Hotel Points Balances
Those changes mean we had a nice increase in our total hotel points balances by the end of December 2022.
- IHG One Rewards – 766,592
- Hilton Honors – 822,950
- Marriott Bonvoy – 115,523
- World of Hyatt – 86,038
- Radisson Rewards – 73,092
- Choice Privileges – 96,665
- Wyndham Rewards – 71,801
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 2
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 845,025
- Capital One – 296,592
Here’s that information in table format for people who prefer to digest it that way:
Hotel Free Night Certificates
There hasn’t been any change in the number of hotel free night certificates we have since last month’s stats.
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 3
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 3
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 4
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 0
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 1
Blog Stats
We managed to get an average of two posts per week published last month.
- Number of blog posts published – 8
- Page views – 16,870
Final Thoughts
Last month was a great month for our stats. We stayed under budget by a significant amount – significant enough to push us under budget for the year as a whole. Our hotel points balances increased nicely too, so it was a nice way to round off the year.
[…] reader, you’ll know that each month we publish our road trip stats. We’d mentioned in our stats for December 2022 that we’d be combining our January and February 2023 stats because we were going to be […]