Frugal Guatemalan Adventures 5.11.11

This installment of the Frugal Destination Series has us going to Guatemala, another fun Central American country where you can stay and eat for way cheap and also get a lot out of your trip. The great part about this is that there are so many things to see and do in Guatemala that it won’t hurt your budget to go back and everyone who goes will have a completely different kind of trip than others. I love places like that, as you well know. I love the Mayan ruins and culture, which Guatemala has in abundance. You can also find many free and inexpensive things to do on your visit, so even though I will list plenty to fill several itineraries, it’s by no means the final list or even the best things to do for everyone.

Antigua Guatemala is a real hotspot for tourists, because there are so many things to do and see in one area and it is way safer than Guatemala City. Brush up on your Spanish and pack your rain jacket, bug repellent and warm weather clothes and start looking for airfare deals!

Climb an active volcano! Pacaya Volcano is a continuously-erupting volcano near the city of Antigua. It is all hiking and much of it is not for the casual hiker, as you will have to hike a decent portion over lava rock. The hike to the "top" is around 1.5 miles, but if you're up to it, you will see amazing views and get to experience standing near an actual lava flow!

Shop, shop, shop in Chichicanstenango - On Thursdays and Sundays you can take advantage of the famous markets in K'iche. You can purchase just about anything: pottery, flowers, food, textiles, clothing and more. It's a fantastic place to get reasonably priced souvenirs and yummy food for lunches or dinners. Next to the market you will also find the Church of Santo Tomas. 400 years old and a major tourist draw.

This place is in RUINS - Ruinas Tikal are Guatemala's largest Mayan archeological site. You can reach Tikal National Park by a short flight and bus ride or you can go straight by bus. You can take a 1-2 day tour (or longer) here, as the drive from Guatemala City is 7 hours. If you choose to go it alone, you can get in on a guided tour once you get to the ruins. Here's some more info.

Visit “Central Park” - You must visit Parque Central in Antigua. It's the center of town where everyone passes through at one point or another. There is awesome people watching as well as historical buildings and a wonderful selection of restaurants. (It's FREE!)

Go jump in a lake - Lago Atitlan is said to be the deepest lake in Central America. 30 miles outside of Antigua, the lake is a volcanic formation and a great place to go swimming or go for a boat ride. It's surrounded by great little villages you may want to visit as well as volcanoes and farms producing corn, onions, squash, chile verde and other produce. Visitors have declared this lake one of the most beautiful places on earth. When you visit, you can decide if you agree. (It's FREE!)

Have a religious experience - There are many ancient churches to visit. You can enjoy the history they have to offer and also the amazing architecture. They generally have a tomb of someone notable and some offer a museum as well. See the tomb of Hermano Pedro in Iglesia de San Francisco, photograph the ornate facade of the Iglesia el Carnen and take a self-guided tour of Convento de Santa Clara. This is just a few of many churches (both standing and those not open to the public) that you can visit on your trip. (Some are FREE!)

Get cultured - It would be a shame to visit a place like Guatemala so steeped in culture and totally skipping any of there multitude of museums devoted to the Mayan people and other history.

Hit the bricks  - Does it seem weird to remind people to walk around the city and take in things around them? There's no better way to experience a city than to go by foot and see as much as you can. You'll have time to really be able to check out the colorful colonial home-fronts, walk the cobblestone streets and see the views of the water and volcanoes in the distance. (It's FREE!)

Do chickens take the bus? - If you're planning to travel anywhere outside of the city, you can save money by taking the Chicken Bus. You won't have any personal space and you'll really get to know your seatmate(s), but it can be a fun way to travel around and do it on a budget.

Are you nuts? - Take a trip to the Valhalla Experimental Station which is home to the organic Valhalla Macadamia Nut Plantation. Nuts fall to the ground when ripe and are harvested by hand. Stop by the farm and sample nuts, chocolates and beauty products and then stay for a meal of macadamia pancakes or other food from the menu (including sandwiches and breakfast dishes). (Tour is FREE!)

Mail call - Outside the servant's quarters of Casa Popenoe, a beautifully restored Colonial Mansion, you can see the pigeon loft, which provided the previous occupants with mail service. The house itself is a fantastic snapshot of what domestic life was like in Colonial times. The house was built in 1634, went into ruin and then was meticulously restored starting in 1932. (Super cheap!)

With all the free and cheap things to do in Guatemala, you will mostly just be paying for lodging and food, which will be pretty inexpensive as well. You will spend the most on airfare, but even so, it may be one of the most affordable vacations you've ever taken!

Join me on the awesome new Savvy Living Community sponsored by Ebates. Not only will you learn how to save money by better utilizing Ebates, but you will also be able to read Savvy blog posts and join in discussions and live chats with Savvy Leaders (like me!) to learn how to save money on all aspects of your life. With 21 bloggers who are experts on everything from travel to family life, you're sure to learn a lot of new information, find some great new blogs and even make some friends along the way. I will be conducting my first live chat on the new community with the three other great bloggers below on Tuesday May 17 at 5-6pm PST. We'll be discussing Saving on Summer Travel.

• Jodi from Live FabuLESS
• Sarah from Yes and Yes
• Dagmar from Dagmar's Momsense

Are you all about being frugal in your life? Travel isn't the only thing we need to save money on these days...and the more you save on one thing, the more you can save on something else you think is more important. Fun maybe! From here on out you will see Shereen Travels Cheap featured on Frugal Focus. You'll see travel deal posts, but you will also see fantastic freebies and coupons as well as tips and articles on living a more affordable life. Frugal Focus takes tips and deals posted by the web's best "frugal" bloggers and puts them all in one place for you. Check it as much as you like or save time by subscribing to the newsletter. Also, find a great list of frugal blogs and useful money-saving websites to help you live more frugally!

Happy Birthday to Ebates! They are 12 years old this week and they are celebrating by giving their Facebook fans gifts! 4 lucky fans will win a $250 Philosophy Gift Bag. Make sure you "like" the Ebates page and also go and join Ebates if you haven't already, because they are super awesome and give you cash back for buying things you already planned! Besides, what other websites PAYS you just to sign up AND to tell people about it? Get $5 for signing up and an additional $5 for each person you refer that signs up and makes a purchase. Plus, the more people you get to join the bigger prizes you can earn, including store gift cards and an iPad.

There are several giveaways I have going right now, so don't forget to sign up to win each one! Here are the details:

Win a Carry On Caddy bag full of travel-size organic toiletries. The bag clips to your carry-on and helps you whiz through airport security by enabling you to have your 3-1-1 bag at your fingertips. No more rummaging in your bag or repacking after the conveyor. You already have to put your shoes back on and stuff your laptop back into your bag. Make this one less thing to worry about. Enter to win on my Facebook page HERE. You can also get a second BONUS entry by subscribing to this blog via GFC or Networked Blogs and then leaving a comment on any of the posts. Enter by 5/15

Shereen Travels Cheap is sponsoring a $10 Target Gift Card on Free Samples 2 Fill Up Your Mailbox's Big Giveaway on Facebook. They were kind enough to let us enter the giveaway after it had started and we've gotten a lot of new fans and page participants (which I love!). You can find out the rules on how to enter HERE. Enter by May 23rd.

Win a $25 Travelocity Hotel Gift Card here on my blog by following me via GFC or Networked Blogs. You can earn more entries by liking my page on Facebook, following me on Twitter, tweeting and/or posting about the giveaway. You will find all the details on how to enter HERE. Enter by 5/21.

Our next giveaway will be that celebrating our 2,000 fan mark. While we aren't there yet, we hope it will be soon and are going to be offering a big travel prize pack with several sponsors (including Travelon, Humangear-GoToobs, SoakWash and more). There will be a lot of ways to gain entries, including referring friends to the Facebook page. When you enter, the form will have a spot to enter the person who referred you to the Shereen Travels Cheap page. This goes back to the very beginning, so start/keep referring people, because the more you refer and the more entries you'll get into this giveaway!

OneNote For Easy Travel Planning

This post brought to you by Microsoft. All opinions are 100% mine.

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to test out a fun new feature on the Microsoft Office program. It's called OneNote and it enables you to create documents quickly and easily. My task was to use the OneNote program and its features to create a TripBook to see how beneficial it was for trip planning. The answer is: incredibly! If you're like me, you find cool things to do all the time and wish there was a place to put them, so you make a note on a Post-it or email it to yourself or print it out and then lose it 10 minutes later. Don't you hate that? Even with my travel organizational binder, I still end up losing more than what ends up in there, so it only really helps me plan for random trips I may or may not ever have or for organizing my current trips.



Here's the coolness that is OneNote. I was asked to create a one-day itinerary for a trip to Melbourne, Australia. As in, what would I do - or tell other people to do - if we only had one day to explore the city. It can also be part of a full vacation. It actually took me longer to download the software than it did to learn how to use it and get started, but I had the added bonus of getting a video tutorial to get me going a bit faster. (There are demo videos available on the OneNote website as well.) The #1 best thing about OneNote is that it syncs to your internet, so you can surf the web and if you find something that you'd like to add to your trip plan, you can click on the "add to OneNote" and it will take the page info and add it to a Notes page for you to sort out and place in the document wherever you want it.


There are some other pretty cool features, too. My favorite is the ‘click and type anywhere’ feature that allows you to type text anywhere on a page. If you don’t like where it is, click and drag it to another part of the page! No more time wasted on formatting paragraphs and margins. You can make the page exactly how you want it by just dragging photos and text and putting them in their perfect place. There are also easy formatting options for each box of text. For example: if you want a set of text to be in a colored box, just add color to the box and you’re good to go. It won’t color your whole page, unless you want it to.
Do you plan trips with friends and family? With OneNote, everything is shared through the Windows Live site (whether they have OneNote or not), so you can share with whoever you like and give them editing permissions. This is great, too, because if everyone likes to do different things, each traveler can pull stuff they think sounds fun and add it to the OneNote and everyone sees it updated immediately. There’s also a funky handwriting option, so if you want to comment on something that someone posted for everyone else to see – and so they know it was you and it doesn’t blend in with the rest of the document – you can add a quick note you hand wrote saying you like it, too, or whatever else you want to write. Once everyone is finished brainstorming about the trip, you can take all the notes and internet “clips” and format them into your very own TripBook. Whether that includes full-page itineraries for each day or just a loose schedule for each day is up to you. Everyone will have had a hand in it and your trip will be totally customized!


You can add other pages to your TripBook by utilizing the tabs up on top and renaming them anything you want. If you have a specific template you’ve used on a page and want to continue using it on all the other pages (say, for Day 1 itinerary through the other days of your trip, like I normally do) with an easy click of your mouse.


Basically, OneNote allows you to be as structured or as freestyle as you want, lets you collect notes, info and pictures all in one place until you’re ready to make them into a usable document. Whether you choose to do it as you go or all at once, OneNote gives you the freedom to create the way it works best for you and helps you look good doing it, all while making it super easy to work with. I loved it and will be using it for all my future travel planning. If you’re like me and do all the trip planning, then this is a fantastic organizational program for you and when you’re done, you can share it with your traveling companions, too.


You can check out the 40 TripBooks on the OneNote TripBook  website, including my Fun and Frugal Day in Melbourne TripBook that I created to give you a taste of things you should not miss on a trip to the city. My TripBook will be available on May 11, but in the meantime, you can see others that have gone up already. They can give you an idea of what you can create in a short amount of time, as bloggers were given just 48 hours to complete their 24-hour itinerary in the city they were assigned. So, not only will you get to see what can be accomplished in OneNote, but you’ll also learn about 40 different cities across the world to get you excited to start planning your next trip! I hope you find the software as useful as I do and start using it for your trip planning and anything else you might create a document for that requires organization and information gathering.

Become a Savvy Hotel Guest 5.7.11

Don't forget to enter to win our current giveaways. 

• Here on the blog you can enter to win a $25 Travelocity Hotel gift card. This drawing goes through May 21. For details click here. 
• You can also enter to win two giveaways on Facebook. Minimus.biz was kind enough to donate a Carry On Caddy full of organic travel-sized products, like shampoo and toothpaste. That giveaway goes through May 15. 
• The second Facebook giveaway is sponsored by us and hosted by Free Samples 2 Fill Up Your Mailbox. You must be a Shereen Travels Cheap Fan and also "like" Free Samples... to enter. The prize is a $10 Target Gift Card (there are many other items to enter for as well) and the last day to enter is May 23. 

Do you know everything there is to know about staying in hotels and getting the best deals? I like to think that I’m a budget travel expert, since I find ways to cut costs or get the most of the dollars I do spend and I can almost always find a discount on anything I want to do. My travels are always packed with fun food finds and awesome activities and I almost always have a folder full of information for things I want to see along with a somewhat detailed itinerary. I know what I want to do and I try my darnedest to get it all in there and do it before I go back home. After all, I may not go back or that thing I wanted to see or do might be gone next time I return.

So, while you’re spending you’re days up to your trip making lists of things to experience and finding discounts for them, booking a hotel or other lodging should be as simple as possible and much easier to choose and book than all those other things. I mean, it’s only ONE thing of many. Here’s how to become a “budget” hotel aficionado quickly. Almost everything is common sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s something that we ever think about when traveling.

Look for extras - Finding a room within your price range that offers free breakfast or a kids eat free option can really save you on dining out. The same thing goes for free WiFi and other incentives. Think about how they will benefit you and your budget. Is there complimentary cookies/fruit and coffee in the lobby? That's included in your room rate, so take advantage of them. Grab one of each on your way in or out. You can carry it as a snack during your day.

Stay right outside the city or in the University District (if there is one) - Hotels in these locations are usually much cheaper. If you planned to use public transportation anyway, you'll just have a bit further to ride. A little longer to rest your feet on the way back "home" each day.

Stay in the middle of the week - It's well-known that hotels boost their prices on the weekend. If you can stay Sunday through Thursday nights instead or minimize your Friday and Saturday stays you can sometimes save up to half.

Stay in "business" hotels over the weekend - Hotels that cater to business travelers have an opposite strategy on the weekend. Rather than raise rates, they often lower them, as most business travelers don't conduct business on the weekends and usually return home on Fridays or Saturdays. You can also get great deals over the holidays.

Book a suite - If you are traveling in a group or have a large family, rather than book several rooms look at pricing for a suite. These have more space, as they normally have multiple bedrooms and can be much cheaper than two or more hotel rooms.

Sign up for hotel rewards programs - Just for being a member of the rewards program, you can get deals on stays that aren't available to everyone else. You can also use the points you racked up for upgrades, incentives and free rooms.

Book a corner room - While this won't really save you money, it will get you more space. Corner rooms are almost alway the same price as the other rooms on the floor, but they have a larger square footage.

Go out to eat - You think going out to eat won't save you money? Well, it will when the other choice is room service. Room service menus seem like a great idea and make everything sound really appealing, but your food is marked up a large percentage of what it would cost if you went to eat in the restaurant and a large gratuity is tacked on as well. Most people don't know this and then add a tip to the receipt when it's brought to the room. 

Bring your own snacks - If you're like me, you get the munchies at inconvenient times. Combat this by bringing your own snacks and drinks and not feeling the temptation pull of the mini-bar. Why pay $8 for a bottle of water when you have brought your own? If you're sad that yours is warm, make an ice machine run and pour it into a glass. 

Keep checking rates - Just because you've already made your reservations doesn't mean you have to pay those rates. Keep checking back or sign up at Yapta and have them monitor rates for you. If there is a price drop, you can call and rebook under the new rate.

Use these tips as a starting base for learning to spend less on your hotel stays and also getting the most of what you do pay. After some time, you'll pick up your own tricks and will wan to share them with others!

I don't know about you, but I find that hotels have a lack of outlets. Well, I have at least 2-3 things I want to plug in at a time. That's hard when there's only one available outlet behind a bedside table or next to the sink. I don't think you should have to move furniture to plug in your phone and I certainly don't want to put electronics next to running water. I always bring my Belkin mini surge-protector that has 3 outlets and 2 USB ports. It's compact enough to carry in your travel bag and plug in almost everywhere, plus it has a rotating plug, so you really CAN put it into any available outlet. We loved the one we had so much, we bought a second one for home use. Now I never have to take the original one out of my carry-on.