We certainly take advantage of all the amazing things around us. I love our current location because we’re a quick 28 minute train ride right into Grand Central, a 30 minute drive to the UWS (aka the Lincoln Center, and even Times Square) or UES depending on traffic, a 20 minute drive to all the amazing food in Queens, and a quick drive away to the lower Hudson Valley. But, because this is the NYC metro area, it’s also incredibly expensive, so in July we did a mini financial experiment where we tried to not spend money on activities or eating out to see how much we would save. We also always have a rotation of guests almost every weekend, and we always want to show them all the fun things near us! Our favorite NYC thing is probably all the cultural institutions – shows, delicious food, and museums – but being able to attend a show on a date night or with friends, for example, easily runs us ~$500 including a sitter. I think most parents with two kids under 3 don’t take advantage of all the NYC things as often as we do (we are lucky enough where we trained the kids to go to bed exactly at 7, so gives us lots of time post-bedtime), so we wanted to see how much we would save if we just did more casual parent things all the time instead.

We didn’t really deprive ourselves, but mostly only cooked at home and our social activities revolved around going to the pool or meetups with other friends/couples, and didn’t buy or improve anything for the house…and easily saved $2k in the month. At least we know we have plenty of wiggle room in our budget if one of us needs to take a pay cut (hopefully we won’t, but a lot of the jobs I’ve been testing in the market would be a pay cut! Sigh).

In that vein, because I’ve had a good amount of free time this summer, I wanted to take advantage of the time to do some girl trips. But then I decided the most important part of a girls’ trip is the quality time with friends, so instead of booking a Caribbean resort with one of my bschool besties, I visited her in Cleveland!

I flew Frontier, stayed with her, did all the touristy things, ate out…and spent maybe $200 for the entire trip, including my Uber to LaGuardia. Lounge access gave me meals on flight days, and my friend drove us around the whole time! So, for once, finally an affordable trip…but also, Cleveland ended up being super fun!

A few highlights:

Lake Erie is beautiful and so vast it looks like a normal ocean beach. Downtown Cleveland was a little deserted, especially compared to NYC, but I really enjoyed all the touristy things like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the world’s LARGEST STAMP!, and the beautiful architecture at the Public Library and other government buildings. We also had lunch at Barrio Taco, and had HUGE tacos for…$2.5 each. My mind was blown. Should we move to Ohio?? (jk…is Chicago this cheap though?!)

I was also really excited to visit Cuyahoga National Park (5th one of the summer!). Cuyahoga is free to visit and considered an “Urban” park. We did the ledges hike which was really fun – of course can’t compare to the national parks of the west coast, but great for Ohio and the east coast.

Cuyahoga!

One night we went line dancing, which I was really bad at but it was so fun! Everyone took it very seriously and you could tell that people attended every week and learned the dances each week. I would definitely participate regularly if we lived there.

Ultimately there is probably a good medium ground between the chaos of NYC and Ohio, but S did an amazing job of showing off the best parts of Cleveland and I had an awesome time. Don’t sleep on Cleveland! Great company, fun things to do, and made all that much sweeter by how cheap everything is.

Next week I will be visiting a friend in London – not quite as cheap as girlstrip in Cleveland, but will hopefully be just as fun 🙂