The trip log came out of the glove box the night we got home, a little warped from mountain humidity and sticky on one corner from something that happened in Savannah. Dana read the receipts out loud, I added them up twice at the kitchen table, and our Smokies and Savannah loop came to $2,940.
That's 11 nights, June 14 to 25, about 2,400 miles and four people. The Pilot's odometer went from 79,200 to 81,600. Here's every line.
The full breakdown
- Gas: $360
- Elkmont Campground, 5 nights at $30: $150
- Vrbo cabin near Townsend, 2 nights with fees: $468
- Hampton Inn in Savannah, 1 night, prepaid in the Hilton app: $151
- Skidaway Island State Park, 2 nights: $104
- Groceries: $640
- Restaurants: $410
- Attractions: $186 (Cades Cove bike rentals $64, Tuckaleechee Caverns $78, and $44 of smaller admissions and Junior Ranger booklets)
- Ice and firewood: $78
- Smokies parking tag, weekly: $15
- Cat sitter, 11 visits at $15: $165
- Travel insurance: $41
- Misc, tolls and souvenirs: $172
Total: $2,940. Our first night, at Ron and Linda's in Ocala, cost nothing but a promise to fix their sticky screen door, which I still owe them.
Camp math
Spread over 11 nights, that's about $267 a night for the four of us, or about $67 per person per night. A few things jumped out when we sorted it:
- Food was the biggest category, not lodging. Groceries and restaurants together came to $1,050, about 36 percent of the trip. All our lodging (campsites, cabin and hotel) came to $873, about 30 percent.
- The tent nights were cheap. Seven nights at Elkmont and Skidaway cost $254, about $36 a night. The three nights with a roof cost $619.
- Gas was $360, about 12 percent. We drove our own Pilot instead of renting a minivan for $1,086. The wear on our car, which I'd estimated at about $288 for the trip, isn't in the total above, and I'm mentioning it so I don't pretend the miles were free.
What surprised us
Groceries. We did a big Costco and Publix shop before leaving, then restocked once near the park and once in Savannah, and we still spent $640. Some of that is prices at the smaller mountain stores. Some of it is that four people who hike in the morning and swim in a cold river in the afternoon eat like a baseball team.
Restaurants were mostly rain. Two wet days in Townsend, a hot evening in Savannah and a couple of breakfasts on the road added up to $410. None of it felt like splurging at the time, which is exactly how restaurant money disappears.
The cat sitter line is one I never begrudge. Isabela, our neighbor's daughter, fed Pickles once a day for 11 days at $15 a visit and texted us a photo every evening, usually of Pickles looking offended that we existed. $165 bought us 11 days of not worrying about him.
The $41 for travel insurance went unused, which is the best outcome. I'd buy it again for a trip with this much prepaid.
And the tent earned its keep. If we'd spent the ten paid nights in hotels at around $220 a night, which is roughly where the Gatlinburg prices I checked started, lodging alone would have been about $2,200, more than double the $873 we actually spent.
What we'd cut next time
- Skidaway in late June. Two nights of 95-degree heat and gnats for $104, plus the $151 hotel night that set it up. More on that in its own post. Next time we'd add two more mountain nights instead, or drive home a day earlier.
- Souvenirs. A hiking stick, a stuffed bear, a sticker from every visitor center and a book about salamanders. All good choices. Next time each kid gets a set souvenir budget at the start, and they decide.
- A few restaurant meals. Maybe $100 of the $410 could have been camp dinners if I'd planned two more easy rainy-day meals.
What we'd keep: the cabin, every dollar of it. The bikes at Cades Cove. The $15 parking tag, which might be the best $15 we spent all year.
We've already started a page in the notebook for next summer. It has one line so far, in Dana's handwriting: "Not the Georgia coast in late June."
