Our cheap vacation!

As much as we would love to go on a Disney trip or a cruise, our budget cannot afford that. So instead we are traveling to good ole Branson, MO. Here is how we are making our trip as affordable as we can:
Accommodations: we will be camping so the total price for our 11 night stay is $352.
My parents paid $100 of it when they booked the campsite (We are very blessed
to have wonderful parents!)
Gas: We figure it will take us about 4 tanks of gas for the whole weekend. Aiming
on the high side of prices we are figuring $240. I think we are figuring more
gas than we will use and higher gas prices so hopefully that will go down.
Food: With having the luxury of our kitchen plus the outdoors to cook, we are only
counting the money we would use to go out to eat and whatnot since we would
be eating at home anyway. So we are figuring $150 since we really don't plan
on eating out much at all.

This brings us up to roughly $650. My parents will have their boat and wave runner for us to use with no cost to us and the campground has pools on it. We also received our season passes to Silver Dollar City for Christmas gifts so we won't have to worry about tickets to go. So we are saving $350 for any other activity we want to do or things the kids would like to buy. So that brings our total vacation cost to $1000 for 12 days of fun! With that being said, Chris worked 4 nights of overtime racking in an extra $550! We have also been saving all of our soda cans for the past year and will be turning those in before we leave. My parents are also giving us all of their cans and I have a coupon for an extra $.05 for each pound (that might be small but it adds up when we have lots of pounds of cans!) We are going to split this up between the three kids for their spending money. I also worked extra hours over a busy weekend at work and received an extra $200 on my check. So our total savings from overtime work is $750 which leaves us only $250 from our savings! So that is how we are able to afford a very nice vacation for our kids on a limited budget!