Well, we haven’t turned the car around and driven home yet (despite threatening it a few times), so I’m calling this trip a major win so far!

The last couple days have been spent time in Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, and Las Vegas. One was beautifully remote, the other was basically the opposite, but both were a lot of fun.

I have never been to Utah before, and the drive into the area we were staying was one of the most interesting 5-6 hours of my life. It seemed like with every turn the scenery completely changed. By the time we got into the national park, it was so cool I was definitely definitely doing that “KIDS LOOK OUT THE WINDOW HOW DO YOU NOT THINK THIS IS AS AMAZING AS I DO” thing that my own parents used to do on vacation. I get it now, Mom. It’s really awesome!

We were lucky enough to get to stay at a friends’ beautiful family cabin about 15 minutes from the national park. We spent a day hiking with the kids, and it went really well. A lot of the hikes were pretty short, and while they took you up to some amazing views, they were totally doable with young children. The great thing about national parks is that they make it super easy to explore an area (safely!). All the foot paths are marked and you can just park your car right at the beginning and take off.

If you ever find yourself in at Capitol Reef, there’s a really cute place within the park called Gifford Homestead that has ice cream for $1 (seriously, what can you buy for $1 these days?). The pie was awesome too!

After Utah, we hit the road again. The drive from Utah to Las Vegas was another beautiful one, but the first half of it put a major kink in my working from the road plan. I had no idea there was so much remote “dead” space in the area!At one point, we literally had to stop and wait for a cow to cross the road, so yeah, I had no service at all on either of my devices. If/when we do a trip like this again, I’ll have to be better about looking ahead to see how much “stuff” is around the routes we’re taking, and plan on being without WiFi when it looks remote.

Once we got back on the interstate, it was a pretty fast drive to Las Vegas. I’ve been to Vegas a few times, pre-kids, and distinctly remember saying “this would be the last place I’d ever want to bring my kids!” Well, I still don’t think I’d ever choose to do a full Vegas vacation with the kids, but 20 hours there was about perfect. We actually had a lot more fun than I thought we would.

The nice thing about Vegas is it’s ridiculously cheap to stay there. Makes sense if you think about it–the hotels want you to gamble in their casinos! We ended up going real cheap and staying at the Flamingo. It was like $35 for a room and it’s right on the strip, next to all the nicer casinos like Caesar’s Palace, Bellagio, etc. One thing to note, is that the pools in Vegas all close at 5PM (except for Planet Hollywood, which is apparently open until 8). So we checked in around 4:30, got our swimsuits on and headed down to the pool with two very excited kids, annnnd, it was closing. We got to use it in the morning, but still would have been nice to know!

We originally thought we’d do a buffet for dinner, but the thought of spending $75 to sit down and keep our antsy kids from kicking each other under the table for an hour or two didn’t sound so appealing. So we ended up just walking around the strip and getting food to share as we walked. We got some amazing fish and chips at Gordon Ramsey’s super creatively named Gordon Ramsey Fish & Chips ($15, and the portion was huge!), steamed pork buns at Momofuku (a place we’ve been wanting to check out forever after reading the cookbook), cookies and ice cream at Milk Bar (the cereal milk soft serve was ridiculously good), and of course a cheeseburger at In & Out.

If you’ve ever been to Vegas you know there are a million places to stop and get a drink, too, but it’s just as easy (and a lot cheaper) to pop into one of the many convenience stores located inside the casinos or along the strip, and buy single beers. They have good craft beer in the fridges and it was only like $3-$4 (vs about double or more if you buy one from a bar). The bottle of Gatorade we bought for the kids to split was actually more expensive than the beer!

We didn’t go to any shows or anything, but the fountain at Bellagio, the M&Ms Store, the mini Eiffel Tower, and just wandering around the fancy casinos, provided more than enough entertainment for the night.

While I’m not organized enough to be keeping track of exactly how much money we’ve spent on this trip so far, I’m feeling really good about where we’re at. Turns out you really don’t have to spend a ton of money to have an amazing vacation. Lots of memories being made. And we’re not even halfway done!

Tonight we finally get into California, another state I’ve never been to. I can’t wait to see what adventures await us on the West Coast!

PS. This is my time not bringing any camera, other than my iPhone, on a trip. With so much stuff to drag around, I just didn’t want to add my heavy DSLR to the mix. So far I don’t regret the decision at all!

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Ben’s on the Road: Days 4 & 5

Welcome back to Ben’s on the Road, where one brave Ben’s Bargains editor (me!) attempts to drive across the country with three kids aged five and younger, for as cheap as humanly possible.

Yesterday was my first day on this trip working a normal Ben’s work shift from the car. It’s pretty cool, actually, how easy it is to do my job from anywhere I want, including a moving minivan (my husband is driving; hopefully that is obvious!). My tech setup is not complicated: my Macbook Pro laptop, a power converter (so I can have my laptop plugged in and charging), a mobile hotspot, and my iPhone.

I’ve experimented with a bunch of different  hotspots and have found that if you’re going to be traveling cross-country, you really need to have the ability to connect to multiple service providers. They all have different areas where the signal is spotty or just nonexistent, so it works best to have more than one you can connect to. I have a Verizon pay-as-you-go 4G LTE hotspot, as well as my T-Mobile iPhone with unlimited data and tethering capabilities. Because my T-Mobile data is unlimited, I use that for WiFi whenever I can. Then if the signal goes weak, I switch over to my Verizon hotspot. I have used a prepaid AT&T hotspot before as well, but I wasn’t as happy with the speed/reliability on that one.

I bought my Verizon hotspot on clearance at Best Buy for $15 (it’s currently $50 online though). It’s called the Ellipsis Jetpack. I pay $100 for 10GB of data that needs to be used within 2 months. Because I also use my phone for WiFi, I shouldn’t have to refill the data at all over our 15-day trip.

To keep my laptop charged, I have this power converter for the car. You plug it into the cigarette lighter and it gives you two AC outlets and two USB outlets. Nothing fancy about this model, but it was like $20 and has worked just fine.

Add my beloved Macbook Pro (which is fancy and was not like $20!), and that’s all I need to work from the road. I feel pretty lucky I’ve got a job I can do from anywhere. And that I don’t get car sick!

Aside from a few 5 to 10 minute chunks of time where neither my phone or my hotspot had service, I have been able to stay connected really well! We just passed through the mountains in CO and I rarely lost connection even on the stretches of road between small mountain towns. Not bad!

We stayed with family close to Denver last night, and today we’re headed to a cabin near Capitol Reef National Park in Southern Utah. The drive has been absolutely gorgeous! Looking out the windows at the mountains is almost entertainment enough, but we also stopped off and spent some time in the little town of Idaho Springs. I love mountain towns, and this one was about as charming as they come. They have a nice park/playground right by the river, and a very unassuming and inexpensive taco joint called Del Rio Taco that had some of the best fish tacos I’ve ever had. You can sit outside on their patio and watch people rafting down the river below. If you’re ever in the area I highly recommend it!

I’m a sucker for a good photo opp, so a few hours later we also just pulled over on a random exit with a view, had a snack and snapped some pictures.

To find things like this to do when we need a break from driving, I use an iPhone app called Roadside America ($2.99). It uses your phone’s location to give you a list of “off beat” things to do close to the highway. I also like the app Roadtrippers (free!). With this one, you can see things to do, quick snacks, outdoor activities, etc, near your current location, or put in a specific route and see everything along the way on a map.

Tomorrow we’ll be exploring Utah and giving hiking with kids a try. I’m so excited to spend some time in an area I hear is just gorgeous. Watch for lots of pictures soon!

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Ben’s on the Road: Days 2 & 3

Welcome to the very first entry in our very first travel blog series! My name is Kristin, but if you’ve been around Ben’s at all, you might know me better as AgentK. For the last five years or so, I’ve spent a lot of time finding and posting deals for Ben’s, and by this point, I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at saving money online. But when we decided to hit the road for 15 days, and head for California with our three kids (5, 3, 10 months…yes we’re a little insane), I knew I was going to have to try and take my “bargain hunting” skills to a whole new level.

To clarify: this is not going to be a trip where “cheap” means picking a 4 star hotel over a 5 star, or going with Subway over Jimmy Johns for lunch. We’re talking let’s spend as close to $0 as possible each day, until we get to our destination. Basically, we can’t afford this trip. But because I believe you can’t put a price tag on making memories, we’re going to do it anyway…and just be really, really cheap about it.

Because technology is cool (and again, we’re on a major budget here), I will be working my regular hours for Ben’s the whole time we’re on the road. This will be my second long trip working remotely (we did a two week long trip to New Orleans last fall), and I have a lot of good tips to share on how to make it work, thanks to a lot of trial and error.

Anyway, I’m super excited to get out and see some parts of the country we haven’t seen before, and I hope you’ll follow along!

Our itinerary:
We’re leaving from Minneapolis, going as far as Southern California (Disney! LEGOLand!), and then heading back home again. Because we have small children with even smaller attention spans, we don’t plan on driving more than 6 hours total on any given day. Places we’ll be spending time along the way include Denver, Southern Utah, Las Vegas, and then on the way home we’ll hit the Grand Canyon, Albuquerque, and Kansas City.

Our car setup:
When we bought our minivan a couple years ago (I know, so lame, but have a few kids and you’ll get one too I promise), we purposefully didn’t get one with a built-in DVD/Blu-ray player because I knew as soon as we went there, I’d never talk to my children in the car again. But I am definitely not above keeping them entertained with movies on longer trips! So we have this super fancy setup for our vacation: a portable DVD player we found for $7 at Goodwill, mounted on top of a cooler (when I say I’m cheap, I’m not kidding!).

For sound, we have the DVD player plugged into the aux port of our car, and adjust the fade so that the sound only comes out of the back speakers (next to the kids). Up front, we have this Altec Lansing Solo Bluetooth Speaker ($15 in the pink color), mounted to the console with velcro 3M Command Strips. Allows us to listen to our own music or podcasts while the kids get their movies in the back.

Most of the movies we have at home are Blu-rays/digital copies, so we had fun picking out DVDs the kids hadn’t seen before at Goodwill in the weeks leading up to our trip (they’re $1.99 each there).

Food: We’re planning on eating sandwiches for lunch each day, so we brought loaves of bread, lunch meat, cheese, peanut butter and jelly, etc in a cooler and will picnic it up at rest stops or random parks along the way. We also made a huge batch of cold press coffee ahead of time and put it in an empty 2-liter soda bottle. As much as I’d like to hit up Starbucks drive throughs, this is much cheaper and probably tastes better!

Accommodations: We’re doing a mix of hotels, camping, staying with friends/family, and maybe even just sleeping in the van. Because we don’t know exactly when we’ll want to be done driving for the night (depends on how crazy the kids are being), we don’t book any hotels until like an hour before we arrive. More on this on another post, but we use Priceline Express to get cheap (under $75/night) rooms last-minute, and we also have a Priceline credit card that earns us points toward free stays. For me, half the fun of a road trip is not having solid plans and playing it by ear. It’s an adventure and I absolutely love it.

So day #1 is complete and we made it past the most boring part of the journey: through Iowa and part of Nebraska. Our stops included a rest area and, wait for it, Fleet Farm. Thrilling! Tomorrow we’ll get into Colorado and things should start to look a little more interesting.

Off to swim with the kids…check back tomorrow for a post about my “work from the car” setup, and more!

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Ben’s on the Road: Day 1