{"id":29596,"date":"2017-08-14T12:45:43","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T19:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/?p=29596"},"modified":"2017-08-14T12:52:55","modified_gmt":"2017-08-14T19:52:55","slug":"bens-road-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/features\/bens-road-day-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben’s on the Road: Day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

\"bens-road-trip\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Welcome to the very first entry in our very first travel blog series! My name is Kristin, but if you\u2019ve been around Ben\u2019s<\/a> at all, you might know me better as AgentK. For the last five years or so, I\u2019ve spent a lot<\/em> of time finding and posting deals for Ben\u2019s, and by this point, I like to think I\u2019ve 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\u2019re a little insane), I knew I was going to have to try and take my \u201cbargain hunting\u201d skills to a whole new level.<\/p>\n

To clarify: this is not going to be a trip where \u201ccheap\u201d means picking a 4 star hotel over a 5 star, or going with Subway over Jimmy Johns for lunch. We\u2019re talking let\u2019s spend as close to $0 as possible each day, until we get to our destination. Basically, we can\u2019t afford this trip. But because I believe you can\u2019t put a price tag on making memories, we\u2019re going to do it anyway…and just be really, really<\/em> cheap about it.<\/p>\n

Because technology is cool (and again, we\u2019re on a major budget here), I will be working my regular hours for Ben\u2019s the whole time we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019m super excited to get out and see some parts of the country we haven\u2019t seen before, and I hope you\u2019ll follow along!<\/p>\n

\"bathroom-tech\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our itinerary:<\/strong>
\nWe\u2019re leaving from\u00a0Minneapolis, 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\u2019t plan on driving more than 6 hours total on any given day. Places we\u2019ll be spending time along the way include Denver, Southern Utah, Las Vegas, and then on the way home we\u2019ll hit the Grand Canyon, Albuquerque, and Kansas City.<\/p>\n

Our car setup:<\/strong>
\nWhen 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\u2019t get one with a built-in DVD\/Blu-ray player\u00a0because I knew as soon as we went there, I\u2019d never talk to my children in the car again. But I am definitely not above keeping them entertained with movies on longer trips!\u00a0So we have this super<\/em> 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!).<\/p>\n

\"bathroom-tech\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a> ($15 in the pink color), mounted to the console with velcro\u00a03M Command Strips<\/a>. Allows us to\u00a0listen to our own music or podcasts while the kids get their movies in the back.<\/p>\n

\"bathroom-tech\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most of the movies we have at home are Blu-rays\/digital copies, so we had fun picking out DVDs the kids hadn\u2019t seen before at Goodwill in the weeks leading up to our trip (they\u2019re $1.99 each there).<\/p>\n

\"bathroom-tech\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Food:<\/strong> We\u2019re 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<\/a> ahead of time and put it in an empty 2-liter soda bottle. As much as I\u2019d like to hit up Starbucks drive throughs, this is much<\/em> cheaper and probably tastes better!<\/p>\n

Accommodations:<\/strong> We\u2019re doing a mix of hotels, camping, staying with friends\/family, and maybe even just sleeping in the van. Because we don\u2019t know exactly when we\u2019ll want to be done driving for the night (depends on how crazy the kids are being), we don\u2019t book any hotels until like an hour before we arrive. More on this on another post, but we use Priceline Express<\/a>\u00a0to 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\u2019s an adventure and I absolutely love it.<\/p>\n

\"bathroom-tech\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So day #1 is complete\u00a0and we\u00a0made 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\u2019ll get\u00a0into Colorado and things should start to look a little more interesting.<\/p>\n

Off to swim with the kids…check back tomorrow for a post about my \u201cwork from the car\u201d setup, and more!<\/p>\n

Check here for latest Travel gear deals<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the very first entry in our very first travel blog series! My name is Kristin, but if you\u2019ve been around Ben\u2019s at all, you might know me better as AgentK. For the last five years or so, I\u2019ve spent a lot of time finding and posting deals for Ben\u2019s, and by this point, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":29613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1008,657,28,479,203,1934,1933,1935],"class_list":["post-29596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-bluetooth","tag-cars","tag-movies","tag-road-trip","tag-travel","tag-travel-gear","tag-traveling","tag-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29596"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29604,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29596\/revisions\/29604"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}