We had a pretty lazy day. We slept in late and felt bad about all the nights we have spent at Cracker Barrels for free, using their bathrooms but only eating their once so we decided to have breakfast at the Cracker Barrel. It was quite busy with a line out the door and we had to wait about 15 minutes to be seated. After we got seated it took almost an hour to get our food. The food was decent though and Holly really like the Hash Brown casserole. By the time we finished breakfast it was already noon so I guess it was brunch.
I had a hankering for steak so we went to the Meat Company. This is a small local chain of butcher shops which actually slaughters and butchers cows on site once a week. Their meat was a little more expensive than the supermarket but we thought we would give it a try. The store had a wide selection of meats and cheeses. We bought a ribeye and a top sirloin steak for later dinners.
We spent the rest of the day at a local library doing homeschooling before Cracker Barrel for the night.
We spent most of the next day doing more homeschooling. Late in the afternoon we did our last purchased activity, going to the Pirate’s Cove Mini Golf. Pirates Cove is a huge mini-golf place with six different courses. The landscaping was Pirate themed and very pretty with waterfalls and pirate trivia along the course.
We noticed that there was a large empty parking lot next door to the Cracker Barrel that had a for sale sign in front. We don’t like to boondock in the same business more than two nights in a row so we moved over to that parking lot and it proved even quieter than the Cracker Barrel since there were no morning deliveries.
June 30 is the middle of the year so we did our mid-year financial checkup. Our finances are good, largely due to the good stock market and we have more money now than when we left California. I expect our expenses this year to be much higher than last year though as we are driving around and spending money on tourist attractions. Thanks to the generous government stimulus I expect the drain on our savings to be roughly similar to last year and we should be only slightly over budget for the full year.
We continue to live a vacation life at a stay at home cost. For example we will have spent 10 days in the Wisconsin Dells, going to multiple waterparks and enjoying many of the tourist attractions with our total accommodation, transport and attraction cost of about $550. Compare this to a regular vacation where rooms at the Wilderness Resort run over $400 a night and the Kalahari resort cost over $800 a night. The cheapest hotel rooms in the Dells cost at least $45 a night. We also saved a lot of money by mostly cooking ourselves rather than spending at least $40 a meal eating out.