Having recently gotten back from a Thanksgiving vacation (road trip across four states!), I had had to think about how to maintain my coffee habit/caffeine addiction while away from my trusty kettle and Trader Joe’s instant coffee. Though I cut down from two cups a day to one a couple of months ago (thus saving quite a bit of money right there), doing so took long enough, with many caffeine withdrawal headaches to boot, that I don’t I’m quite ready to try to cut down much further. And so, driving almost a thousand miles across the country, I had to have my coffee, at least once, every day.
Obviously, driving across the country (with the several motel/hotel stays required for such a trip) already represents quite an expenditure, so throwing five bucks or more at a cup of coffee is not something I really want to do. So, how did I get my fix? There were a few options I thought of, though there were a few to which I gave much more consideration.
Get Cheaper Coffee
You don’t have to go to Starbucks, or some other name brand coffee shop while you are on the road, for starters. Heck, there are long lengths of interstate that don’t have that any of the name brand coffee chain locations. But there are bunches of McDonald’s locations pretty much everywhere along the interstate highway system, and McDonald’s serves coffee as well. Their coffee is much less expensive than that other place’s.
And, according to Mrs. D&$, it tastes like it. (I have never tried it, but I trust my wife’s opinion on such things.)
Get Hotel Coffee
I’m picturing some of you scrunching up your face into an “ewww” look. Hotel coffee? Really? Well…sometimes. It rather depends on the hotel or motel at which you are staying.* If you are staying at the cheapest motel you can find, you might not want to drink their coffee (or breathe their air!). But if you are staying at a place that wants to keep your business, their coffee might be worth sampling.
On my most recent trip, we stayed at a fairly nice place with lots of good coffee, real cream, every sweetener you could ask for, and even squirts of caramel flavoring available. Unfortunately, as we headed for home and stopped at a not very good example of a usually quite good chain, I did not have the same coffee experience on the final morning of our trip. No real cream was available, only a few of those small thimbles-full of artificial flavored creamer. Not at all the same, thank you very much.
I assume my readers are savvy enough to know where the coffee is going to be good, though.
In general, I find the coffee at Starbucks to be better than what’s served at most motels. Photo by Dom J from Pexels.
Get Free Coffee
Given the mornings during which the coffee offerings weren’t that good, I found myself needing to visit Starbucks for a mocha. Since, as I said, I don’t really endorse the idea of throwing down five bucks every time I want one of those cups of creamy goodness, I like to take advantage of free gift cards from rewards programs.
Here are some of the programs I have used to get several Starbucks gift cards:
- Microsoft Rewards: I do a good deal of my searching through Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, thereby earning points which are redeemable for gift cards (and since they don’t offer a PayPal option, free coffee is one of the best alternatives, in my opinion).
- MobileXpression: If you don’t mind having a company monitor your phone’s internet traffic via their VPN, it’s pretty easy to earn credits every week. Running MobileXpression for six weeks gets you a $5 gift card; ten gets you $10.
- S’More: One of the remaining lockscreen advertising apps, S’More takes longer to pay out than MobileXpression, but it’s not nearly as intrusive as a VPN, either. Running this app for 50 days gets you a $5 gift card.
Click here to join S’More.
My Coffee Preference
As I said, if I could go for the free hotel coffee on my trip, I would do so. At the nice hotel, it was located right next to the hot breakfast. It was, in general, a rather nice morning experience each day I was there. Aside from that hotel, though, I was craving Starbucks. Thankfully, I had a lot of reward points built up through Microsoft Rewards, and so I never paid for a cup of coffee during my week-long trip.
Assuming my readers share my addiction to coffee: how do you get your coffee fix when you are away from home, without a lot of unnecessary spending?
* This ought to go without saying, but yes, I’m only referring to the establishment at which you are staying. It’s not considered good form to walk into some other hotel just to drink their coffee.
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