We are huge advocates of using up all your PTO, especially if you’re on a use it or lose it system at work. Time off is an opportunity to recharge, even if you love your job. It’s also an opportunity to travel, which is what we love to do. Travel can be a pinch on the budget, though. Stats from Budget Your Trip suggest a one-week vacation costs an average of $1,984 for just one person while Forbes says a family of four can spend $3,600 for just three days. (1) If you’re on a tight budget, travel might not be an option this season, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy time off. For years, my husband had more paid leave than I did, so he’d take a staycation. If you’ve got vacation time to use frugally, we’ve got you covered with ten great staycation ideas to enjoy your time off at home.
Mix and match to your heart’s content!
1. Do the tourist thing
We live in a center hub for tourism, so the vast majority of the time, we avoid the touristy traps like they’ll bite us and turn us into zombies.
For a staycation, embrace it. Explore the entertainment out of towners often enjoy. Some ideas include:
- Go to a museum (check your local library, they may offer free passes)
- A botanical garden
- The Ferris wheel that looks over the beautiful congestion of rush hour traffic below
- A local monument
- A historical landmark
- A popular hike or waterfall
- Visit a distillery, winery, etc.
If you’re like us, you’ll have a theme park nearby. If your budget can afford it, go enjoy! Many offer a state resident discount or a Groupon coupon.
Got bigger plans for your money this year? That’s fine, save the expensive parks for another time. Mickey Mouse and Dolly Parton will be around next year.
Instead, see how close you can accidentally get to a gator without realizing it in a nature park instead. They’re usually free or only a few bucks.
2. Get a hotel for a night or weekend away
Just because you stay home doesn’t mean you have to physically be in your house. If you’re doing a week-long staycation, you don’t have to spend all week in a hotel. If you’re going to do that, you might as well get out of Dodge. But if your budget permits, get a hotel for a night or two to get a change of scenery without having to pay for expensive flights.
Aim for weeknights instead of the weekend, as hotels usually discount rates on less popular nights.
Hang out by the pool, grab a bottle of wine or a 6-pack from the local grocery or liquor store, and relax in style. Walk the property, use the amenities. Live up the travel life without having to leave town.
If you have kids and can find a family member to watch them for a night or two, even better!
3. Staycation with a nice dinner
Is there a place you’ve wanted to try around town but it was too $$$ for a normal Saturday night dinner? Treat yourself to a dinner as the cherry on top of your staycation, especially if you’re a foodie.
Michelin star guides came to our metro a few years ago, and one of my bucket list items was to go to one. We treated it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We got dressed up and made an entire evening out of it for our staycation. We left our phones in our pockets and spent the evening catching up and simply enjoying the food and each others’ company, something that can be the exception instead of the rule when married for years.
Admittedly, my husband gagged when he saw the bill. While I used the restroom, he took the opportunity to calculate what percentage of our annual income the dinner equated. (It was around $150 if I remember correctly, a lot more than we usually spend out.) I had to remind him it wasn’t something we were going to do every weekend or even again that year.
To make it more frugal, forego drinks at dinner. You can pregame with a snack or postgame with a cheap stop to fast food and a bottle of Aldi Winking Owl when you get home. That way, you can enjoy the fancy food without making your budget cry.
You can also try a copycat night at home. Think of where you’d go if money wasn’t an object and what you’d get from the menu. Then search online for a copycat recipe. There are tons out there that people have experimented with and uploaded. We shared our top 5 favorite restaurant copycat recipes if you need an idea on where to start.
4. Go camping locally
If you live somewhere where mosquitos won’t give you Zika if you dare to walk into their territory, consider camping. You don’t need to glamp with a camper or RV. A simple tent (check Facebook marketplace or local community groups for a used one) and a camping space rental can save you loads versus a hotel. Use the opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors. Hike an area you haven’t explored or take board games or a deck of cards and hang out at the campsite for the week.
You can even camp in your backyard if you have the space and the interest. Light up the firepit, get some marshmallows, and get ready for story time with hand puppets on the side of the tent with the flashlight.
5. Host a family reunion
If you’re an extravert and like to gather with others during your staycations, invite family over to enjoy the week off with you. They might not be able to spend the entire week together, but may take a few days off work or stay for a long weekend.
Having a mini family reunion at home can be a great way to stay in touch without the financial hangover of the cabin Airbnb for the holidays on a credit card.
6. Have a pool(ish) day
If you have a pool at home, this is as easy as pulling out the water guns, pool noodles, and floats. In my experience, pool owners often spend a lot of time and money maintaining pH levels, but then hardly ever dip into the water for a swim. Make the most of your investment for your next staycation! Channel your inner Michael Phelps or Lonely Island, sans a boat. Get your swim trunks and your flippy floppies and flip some burgers on the deck for a blast.
If you don’t have a pool at home, there are community pools, even if you don’t live in a complex with a pool covered in your HOA fees. Check out local public pools, but make sure to wear your flippy floppies in the changing rooms because no one wants athlete’s foot as a staycation souvenir.
You can even get a cheap kiddie inflatable pool. I know it sounds like a white trash party, and it probably is, but I got one of these during the COVID pandemic to get out of the house. I thoroughly enjoyed soaking in the sun while I floated in the water. Grab a couple White Claws, sparking water, or Popsicles and enjoy.
You can even make a special staycation playlist and whip out the wireless speaker. Since my husband didn’t want to partake in the inflatable pool festivities, I listened to a lot of Thomas Rhett and Chase Rice while relaxing and enjoying decompression days. #LivingTheCountryDream
If you have young kids and want to go even cheaper, spring for a $10 sprinkler attachment for the hose and set it up the backyard. Cue the music, add the mayhem, and it’s a jolly good time. Don’t forget to invite the neighborhood kids over to make it a party.
A slip and slide is another option for a fun staycation at home with the kids, but the Dane Cook joke about related injuries is a lesson to heed. It’s all fun and games until you go sliding down without the optimal water coverage and end up with road rash from shoulder to ankle.
7. Plan a themed movie marathon
Have you been meaning to see all the Daniel Craig Bond movies? Or Knives Out and Glass Onion coupled with the Agatha Christie Poirot movies. Perhaps you’re more of a Christian Bale fan but never found the time to binge his Batman movies, or the newer Robert Pattinson one (which was surprisingly good, though a completely different spin on the genre).
Grab your favorite movie snacks. A dollar store is a great place to snag some movie theater snacks for home, or pop some Orville Redenbacher’s. While you can grab a two liter and split it for some jumbo movie theater sized sodas and diabetes, we recommend avoiding consuming liquids. Some family members don’t appreciate having to pause every twenty minutes for bathroom breaks. Plus, no one likes being the person who leans over and whispers, “What did I miss?”
Snuggle up with a blanket, draw the curtains, and crank the volume up for maximum adventure.
8. Check Atlas Obscura for local places of interest
While we prefer hiking in the wilderness to urban exploring, we’ve done a lot of road trips and visited many cities across the US while tackling our bucket list of visiting all 50 states. When we’ve got a long stretch of driving with nothing but flat plains and empty roads or have extra time to sightsee in the city, I always plug our location into Atlas Obscura to check what’s around.
Their mission is to “inspire wonder and curiosity about the incredible world we all share.” They do so by sharing some of the world’s most odd and unique places overlooked in tour books. They’ve apparently branched out into the foodie realm too, so it might be useful for your fancy night on the town mentioned above.
Some things we’ve explored during our Atlasing include:
- a Stonehenge in Alabama, close to colorful dinosaurs
- a section of the Berlin Wall
- a church that looked like a chicken
- hilarious epitaphs in a Key West cemetery
- a secret garden sanctuary of parrots
- the Tiffany dome at the Chicago Public Library
The number of suggested attractions varies greatly by location, but plug in your town and see what’s nearby. You may be surprised by some of the unique, fascinating sightseeing opportunities you’ve never heard of.
9. Make it a game night
Board games are making a comeback, and we’re glad for it. We spend most Friday evenings sitting around the dining room table, playing card games like Cards Against Humanity, What Do You Meme, and Joking Hazard or more strategic board games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and The Captain Is Dead.
If you’re a storyteller by heart, you can use your staycation doing an epic campaign of Dungeons and Dragons with the family.
If you want to use your staycation to reconnect with family, conversational cards have become popular in the past few years, like Questions for Humans or The Hygge Game.
More into pop culture or history? Trivia is another great way to go. Trivial Pursuit is the OG of the pop culture game. Jackbox Games lets you take your trivia and other gaming digital. Or you can go the route of the Stuff You Should Know trivia game if you’re a podcast listener and fans of Josh and Chuck.
No matter your interests, you’ll find some tabletop entertainment to enjoy. If not gaming or chatting, consider a puzzle.
If you don’t have any games, you can get some cheap at Wal-Mart or on Amazon. Also consider second-hand shops like Goodwill. There’s extra fun in buying a $0.50 puzzle from Goodwill and wondering the entire time you put it together if it has all the pieces. Extra adventure on your staycation!
10. Look Up for Stargazing
Space is amazing, y’all. Did you know there are more galaxies in the universe than grains of sand in the entire world?
Let that sink in for a minute.
It’s hard to imagine something so vast with our limited exposure to it from our pale blue dot in the universe, but there are ways to get closer to the vastness of space.
We love to set up the telescope and use it with a free AR app like Star Chart that will map the night sky to guide your stargazing.
Seeing the rings of Saturn from 800 million miles away is an out of this world experience. During certain times of the year, you can also see some of the Jovian moons around Jupiter.
If you don’t have a telescope, you can buy some glow-in-the-dark stars and make your own constellations on the bedroom ceiling for kids (or adults, no judgement!).
To save the popcorn ceiling and worrying about asbestosis exposure, you can also grab a picnic blanket or beach towel, spread out on the driveway, and look to the night sky. This was one of my favorite things to do on clear nights as a kid. Storytellers can make up tales of aliens in galaxies far, far away and share with their families.
Haven’t seen Troup Zero yet? Add it to your space movie marathon before your stargazing evening. A few other greats to consider include Interstellar, The Martian, and Alien. Just do yourself a favor and skip Gravity. That’s two hours of your life you’ll never get back.
Have some more great staycation ideas?
Do you have a frugal idea on how to vacation at home that we forgot? Share it with your fellow brigadiers in the comments below!