A few weeks ago, a good friend asked me if I would join her in a resort town in the mountains this weekend. She had been invited by another friend of ours, and wanted me to go along aswell. The town is about 90 minutes from our house, and she had the use of another friend’s condo for the weekend, so it didn’t seem like a bad idea.
Then is snowed. We got a dumping this weekend. It started snowing in the mountains on Friday, and kept up through this morning. Some areas got three feet, the town we were going to got two feet. We got about 7 inches down at the bottom of the mtns where we live. The plan had been for me to drive up there either on Friday night after I got off work (at 5pm) or Saturday morning. Friday night I was exhausted and it was dark, cold and snowy, with the roads not looking good in the mtns. I called my friend and said that I’d reconsider in the morning. It wasn’t any better then. I checked road conditions, and the backups looked like they were going to add about 3 hours to the drive, making it 4.5 hrs in traffic on bad roads.
So I bailed. I felt guilty (a common problem of mine) for leaving my friend up there by herself, but I finally decided that I had to honor myself and my intense dislike of being stuck in traffic on a mountain interstate that just creeps along when there’s bad weather. And think of the extra environmental damage caused by running my car for 4.5 hrs each way…
The friend who had arranged the whole weekend had booked a sleigh ride dinner for all of us (her whole family was there) for Saturday night (I had already said I wasn’t interested in going, but apparently she had made a reservation for me anyway). Luckily I backed out of the weekend in time for them to be able to cancel my reservation without a charge. I just looked online and the sleigh ride dinners that I found were $95 – $115 FOR EACH PERSON. Wow. That is the most absurd waste of money I have seen in quite a while. The dinner menu looks like what you’d find in a typical steakhouse (except with very few options)… steak, chicken, salad, bread, potatoes, dessert. Instead, since I was home all day, I made roasted veggies with lentils for lunch, and dinner was homemade whole wheat biscuits with homemade chicken sausage gravy. We didn’t spend any money at all yesterday, and we didn’t drive our cars anywhere. Today, we went to the gym, but didn’t spend any money. I cleaned the house and my husband worked on the computer.
We had a no spending weekend – which is awesome since our credit card cycle ends tomorrow and we’ve only spent $900 on it so far, so we’ll finish well below our $1000 monthly goal. And a very low stress, simple weekend too. I’m so glad that I didn’t spend 9 hours sitting in traffic over the last two days, driving on icy roads, and going on a $100 sleigh ride dinner.
To top it off, my brother and sister just stopped by our house with a huge pot of homemade chili and a basket of fresh biscuits for us. I feel very lucky indeed.
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