Book Review: The 100 Best Affordable Vacations

The following is a review I wrote as part of the Amazon Vine program.  While the books are provided free of cost, the opionions are my own.  I will only post Vine reviews on this site when they are for travel books or travel related products.

This is more than a travel guide.  It is a resource full of a lifetime’s worth of unique and affordable travel opportunities.  While it does sport the number 100 in its title, the actual number of ideas presented in this book must be at least five times that.  Each ‘Vacation Idea’ is really a series of ideas, often with additional vacation destination suggestions in sidebars.  Some offer ideas of specific places to visit—such as one specific working ranch in the Midwest, or one specific shipbuilding workshop in Maine—and others string together a themed vacation.  Who would have ever thought to take a BBQ themed road trip?  But now that you’ve heard the idea, don’t you really want to go on one?

By page 31 of ‘100 Best Affordable Vacations’, I knew that this book was the travel book I didn’t even know I always wanted. For more information about books check this out. By the end, I found myself compiling a list of must-visit destinations in a spreadsheet Perhaps I have a bit of travel OCD as well?

Upon researching many of the suggested destinations, festivals, and tours, I discovered that they are mainly undiscovered—the websites are basic, as are the rates.  This makes me even more enthusiastic about visiting as many of these locations as possible—but a bit wary to suggest this book to others.  After all, I’d prefer it if they stayed unknown and reasonably priced!

The destinations in this book are also refreshingly unique.  From spending the night in a tree house inOregonto spending the night at the NYC Natural History Museum, this is far from your run of the mill guide to cheap hotels and motels.  In fact, I don’t think I ran across a chain hotel suggestion anywhere in this book.  Yet another reason why this is soon to become the most highlighted, most dog-eared, and the most used book on my many shelves.

But for me, the very best part of this book is the third section, a section on Educational Adventures.  Gee—that sounds like the tag line for a blog I’ve read somewhere…

It’s kind of ironic that a book billing itself as containing ‘affordable vacations’ is going to end up costing me so much money—after all, now I simply MUST visit many of these locations!