I Meal Planned and Prepped for My Vacation and I Totally Regret It

For my family of four, vacationing on a budget is the name of the game when it comes to traveling. Our travel budget has to include obligatory plane trips to see family, so the very rare “vacation just to vacation” always has to be done on a dime.

We’ve spent a lot of energy dialing in our grocery budget over the last six months — in part so we can actually take fun family trips — so I thought that meal planning and prepping for a recent family vacation would be breezy and brilliant. We’d have meals to cook at our rental house and we’d save tons of money that we’d otherwise spend eating out.

Turns out that planning and prepping meals for my vacation kind of ruined it.

We live in a corner of the West Coast where we’re a day’s drive from easy vacation spots — the Oregon coast, Washington wine country, and a half-dozen National Parks. We chose Lake Tahoe because I spent summers there as a kid and we could make a pitstop in Reno to visit my brother and his family along the way.

The plan was to pack as much food and supplies from home as we could and grab the rest of the groceries in Reno — about an hour outside Lake Tahoe with more store choices and supposedly cheaper prices. I packed our Instant Pot and three dishes that I had prepped and frozen, along with other staples like salt and oil and a few knives and tools. I even made a Google Doc to share with my brother, whose family came along at the last minute. Thinking I was a vacation food budget genius, I even left room for a few meals out over our five-day trip.

Related: Meal Prep Plan: A Week of Easy Instant Pot Meals

Now seems like a good time to add that this vacation (aka family road trip) was desperately needed by me. We hadn’t had a family vacation — outside of those obligatory visits to see our extended families — since I was pregnant with my youngest (he is 4 1/2 now). Despite money being tight, I was insistent that we squeeze out a five-day vacation.

The first misstep was that we didn’t grocery shop in Reno as planned. We got delayed with sight-seeing in Reno and by my brother’s family needing more time to pack, so we pulled into Tahoe hungry and much later than we expected. Instead of getting groceries, we stopped for burritos and grabbed a rotisserie chicken, beans, and tortillas for dinner later. This bumped our whole meal plan back by a day — but I told myself Its fine! We’ve got some flexibility in our plan!

We had a snafu with our vacation rental that sent us to a hotel for our first night of vacation and also pushed back grocery shopping and cooking a whole extra day. Luckily we had a refrigerator and could easily store the prepped meals. But by the time we got settled in our vacation rental, all of our planned dining-out money had been spent. I think you can guess what that meant.

I spent the next four days of my vacation cooking three meals a day — and making snacks! — for four adults and my two kids. Yes, I could have delegated better (which is maybe another post for the future), but by the time we actually got into our vacation rental I was frantically shifting ingredients around to use up both the meals we packed and the one we grabbed before the Airbnb/hotel kerfuffle.

I really didn’t want to be a mom-on-vacation trope (you know the one — “vacation as a mom: same dishes, different sink”), but I also so badly wanted a vacation where I was willing to cook in order to keep us on budget. I didn’t think about how resentful and not rested cooking on vacation would make me.

Meal planning and prepping for our vacation did keep us under budget, but it also kept us close to our vacation home (instead of on more adventures!) and stymied our ability to be spontaneous with our cooking and eating. And I honestly believe the results would have been the same even if things had gone according to plan.

We’re planning a re-do of sorts — to LakeTahoe — in September for my husband’s birthday, and I’m booking hotels instead of Airbnbs in order to keep me from cooking and cleaning through another vacation.

Do you meal plan or prep for vacations? Do you ever end up regretting it?