Travel Tips - Merry Early Christmas! ;)

Anyone who knows me knows that I pack waaaay too much for trips.  While I have gotten better about this, we now have a kid with another on the way and no matter how economical I am, we are constantly packing more that my hubby and I can schlepp around the airport.  As a result, we almost always need Smart Cartes to lug all of our stuff up to the airline counter.  So the tip of the day?  Scout around for an abandoned cart one before forking over your credit card!  After our first couple of trips, we realized that most people never return their carts to the proper corrals.  Here's a photo of an abandoned cart that I snapped as we waiting in line to go back to Chicago this past Christmas:

You might be asking yourself, is finding an abandoned cart really worth the $5 or so that you would save?  Each person is different and it all depends on that person.  Maybe the convenience is worth just giving over the money.  Our family took 4.5 trips this year, and doing this has saved us between $54-$45 this year.  As we're a single income family at the moment, every penny saved counts.  So for us, the few extra minutes it takes to look around for a cart are worth it.

The other tip that I just learned is one that I have not tried, but I pass onto you, Readers, with high hopes.  When we returned from our annual Christmas trip to Chicago this year, we didn't have our gate opener handy and so had SuperShuttle drop us off at our gate instead of in front of our condo.  One of our neighbors saw my husband hauling our luggage to our condo and inquired as to what was going on.  Hubster explained about SuperShuttle and the neighbor told us the following:  Apparently for years he worked as a driver for Prime Time Shuttle.  Our neighbor told us for future trips to find a hotel with a parking lot to park at and have the shuttle pick us up from the hotel.  Apparently, shuttle services have different rates for home pick up vs. hotel pick up and the hotel pick up rates are cheaper.  Like I said, we haven't tried this yet and so don't know how significant the savings are or if it's even worth the extra step of parking at a hotel, but I pass on this nugget to you, Internet Audience.  If anyone tries this, please let me know how it works out for you!