When you travel, be it to another city in your state, or another country, you have many options on where to stay. The choice can have a rather large effect on your budget for the trip. For us no matter where we go we look for the accommodations that have a kitchen. I know that might sound strange to a lot of people so let me explain why.

The biggest expenses when you travel is usually food and lodging. But with the ability to cook you might be surprised on how much you can cut your food bill down. Not to mention, that apartments are usually about the same price as a hotel room, but in many cases, they can be a lot cheaper than hotel rooms.

We really enjoy eating local food and specialties when we travel. Usually we have an apartment and there is a local market nearby. Everything is so fresh and you can take advantage of products that are very expensive where you live but are reasonable were you are traveling.

For example, when we stay in Barcelona we try to rent an apartment within a couple blocks or so from the La Boqueria market. If you aren’t familiar with that market, let me tell you it is a totally amazing place loaded with all fresh seasonal products at not bad prices either.

For dinner one night when we were there, I made Carbonara for us instead of going out to a restaurant. What I did was purchase two paper cones of Serrano ham for a Euro each. They sell these in the market as teasers to get you to buy the ham. I then picked up some fresh pasta, eggs, cheese, and a bit of cream and went back to the apartment to fix dinner. It was a great dinner and I believe it cost us a little more than 5 Euros for the two of us. That is very good when you consider a typical plate of Carbonara is about 12 Euros, so for the two of us it would have been 24 Euros at a restaurant, just for Carbonara. Generally, when we travel we try to eat Breakfast and Dinner in our apartment and lunch at a restaurant when we are out.

On another trip we had an Apartment in the Rialto area of Venice. It was a charming fully furnished apartment and gave us a small taste of what it was like to live like local Venations and go about daily tasks that most anyone would do that lived there. There were a couple grocery store / markets not far from us and even the Seafood Market was amazing and everything so fresh the market smelled like the Sea, not Seafood.

For us we enjoy experience what it is like to experience the daily culture and renting an Apartment instead of paying for an hotel room, really adds to that experience.