Frugal Friday…

 

I was tempted to call this a “Thrifty Thursday” post instead when I decided to use the photo above as the header - resisted temptation though! This is of course a bank of Thrift down at Gunwalloe on the Lizard Peninsula, taken on our recent week’s holiday down there. As you know, we budget for our annual fortnight up in the Western Isles, that money is set aside and only used for that purpose and things related to it, so any other trips we want to take during the year are funded separately, and this one was no exception.

We knew we wanted to do a full week away, but we’re also determined that it couldn’t cost a fortune as the budget simply isn’t there for that, so decided from the start that careful choices around where we spent money were going to be the winner here to let us have a really enjoyable week without breaking the bank. Accommodation is of course always the big ticket item for a holiday - thankfully we have the tent and are more than happy to use it - and our chosen campsite is a very reasonable £15 a night for a tent, two people and car. To that was added the single night  in a Premier Inn on the way down - £53 there, but it made the difference between getting a full day in a Cornwall on our arrival day and not, so worth the spend. It also provided us with a good breakfast that day for no additional cost, and full travel mugs for the onward part of the journey. Accommodation total then: £158.

When staying in self catering accommodation of any type when away, it is extremely easy for food to become a really significant spend - when in the Hebrides we tend to have lunch out and about, then cook our evening meal back at the cottage, and we took much the same approach for this trip too. We have two camping stoves, a saucepan and a frying pan, and can rustle up some tasty options using those, this time round we mostly opted for salads of some description with an added protein element, and sometimes some cooked pasta thrown in to the salad. It’s straightforward to cook, fairly healthy and balanced, and most importantly tasty. Breakfasts were eaten at the campsite each day - either bacon & egg butties or simply toast - and an even got a double-Yorker in a box of supermarket eggs! Lunches out and about were mostly toasted sandwiches or pasties, with an ice cream or cake for pudding - not cheap in that part of the world, but also not the most pricey choices. Food totalled a fraction over £200, plus some odds and ends that were purchased directly from our own spending accounts - and some household purchases such as topping up our levels of the delicious Cornish Salt flavoured blends. 

Of course there was diesel - for the journey down and travelling about while there. We used the petrol prices app to find the best priced filling stations, and managed to fill up more cheaply throughout than we would have done at home, including stumbling across one exceptionally well priced for the current time option on the Lizard where the service was still attended too - definitely not something you see in many places these days! We put in £152 worth of diesel while away, including a tankful on the way back which will see us through the next week or so of regular driving. There was also some additional travel - two days spent using a day Ranger train tickets (£11.30 each with our railcard) and buses totalling £12 on Saturday to save using the car on a day when we knew we would be visiting some pubs. Parking in a few places too - although generally we opted for reasonable street parking and a short walk to our destinations - another £6 or so - £63 odd in total there then.

Spending not mentioned here came straight from our own spends accounts - beers here and there, oddments of food as mentioned, and I’m not totalling that up simply because it was all stuff we might well have spent during a week at home anyway. 

The total then - roughly £575 for the bits mentioned above. Not “cheap” - but still an extremely good price for a thoroughly enjoyable week’s holiday. There were ways we could have saved more - by choosing to make sandwiches at the tent to take with us for lunches for example, or by taking more food with us. We try not to do the latter in particular though - because when visiting places that rely on tourist spending for their income we’ve always felt it’s important to try to support that. For that reason we choose independent stores over chains where possible, try to buy local products, and aside from things like tea bags, coffee and condiments, take relatively little from home. We do always empty the fridge and fruit bowl of anything perishable- so the remainder of my bottle of oat milk went with us, plus some apples and citrus fruit. Our trusty plastic box full of gleaned sachets of salt, pepper and sauces came in handy as always - including helping out a fellow camper who had found himself without sugar one morning! 

A truly lovely week, funded from a mixture of personal fun money, a surplus accumulated in our food account (deliberately accumulated for just this reason) and some surplus from our bills account too - it will mean a little less into savings this month, but so be it. We’re fortunate to be able to take trips like this, all the more so at a time when many folk are struggling with the increasing cost of living- and we definitely do not lose sight of that privilege. We didn’t consciously choose not to spend on entry fees to places - there just wasn’t anywhere much we found ourselves interested to visit which had such fees. At Tintagel we arrived after the main site was closed and were delighted to find that we could still explore the area up to the bridge for free. Our time on the trains let us see huge amounts of the county as we passed through it, and included a trip across the Tamar Rail Bridge and back, something I’d never done before. A lot of the things we enjoy are simply free anyway - just wandering about and exploring different places.

Robyn