Budget traveling hotels etc

We stay in a lot of hotels. All kind of prices and styles.  One night we spent $47 plus tax on a clean quiet room.  We  had our own private patio with picnic tables next to the laundry.  We had a picnic and priced stuff on the picnic tables while I washed a load of clothes. The next night we stayed in a $95 hotel. We had a lot of stuff to bring in  and price. It took two carts loaded down to get every thing upstairs.  When we finally got every thing in the room.  Mark went into the bathroom and the toilet seat was broke in half.  They gave us another room and we had to haul all of the stuff to the room down the hall to a room  where the toilet ran all night if you did not jiggle the handle.

  You never know what you are  going to get.  We have a few tricks that help.  We always spend the last hour on the road looking on the internet map program  of the city we plan to stay in to find hotels, rates and comments.  We then call and talk to clerks to get an idea of what they have to offer. We always look at the room first and then if possible we book it on line.  You often get a better rate and points in some hotels.  We have a lot of points and get to stay many night with our points.

Another  money saving idea is to eat out as little as possible.  Most trips, we eat out about once a week.  This trip we have eaten out twice. Of course, when we were near the coast, Mark ate fish.  Then we treated our self to Japanese and had enough left over for another meal.  We buy one baked chicken from Walmart and make three meals out of it.  I am the queen of the microwave and take electric  kitchen gadgets to help.
Mark always has a grill with us.  Some times, we stay in an efficiency apartment with a kitchen and cook up several meals, ready for the microwave.  I even used all of the left overs last night to make a great home made...I mean  hotel made soup in my electric pot and corn bread in my XL  gadget.

When you travel as much as we do, you have to know how to budget.  We need to save our money to buy stuff to sell so that we can go back again.  The only thing that we can not budget is what we have to pay for gas. The further north we went, the higher it got.  We have paid 3.59, 3.79. 3.83, 3.89, 3.99, 4.02, 4.08 4.12 and 4.14 :(