London in Under $1500: Incoming!

Mel (my awesome travel companion and college bestie) and I were searching plane tickets on a whim one late night in January. We'd always talked about running away to London, and it seemed suddenly like we could manage it.

We found tickets for $747.40 each, total with all taxes and fees. I'll be honest with you, we had a spaz attack. We flailed, and yelled, and well... I called my parents about twenty times at 1am to tell them (they were understandably cranky). The next morning (at a much more reasonable hour to call my parents) we found a hotel deal that went with our flight. $332.60 for six nights at a gorgeous little hotel in Notting Hill. Amazing! We bought them right then and spent the next three months having random giddy dances at each other. Squee!


On March 20th, we got on the Icelandair flight at SeaTac airport. I won't sugar-coat it, people. The flight was terrible. They didn't feed us at all, the whole flight. Not even peanuts! It felt like an eternity. My little video screen didn't work, which was a bummer, and both the person sitting behind me, and the person behind Melanie barfed. Loudly. Yuck. It's also important to note that aisle seats on Icelandair flights have about 2/3rds the under-seat size of the regular seats. This was a pain in the butt, since we were both doing carry-on only and had brought pretty big personal bags. We caved and bought crappy sandwiches at midnight-ish for about 7 euros each. Definitely pack your own food (and plenty of it) for Icelandair flights.

We had a quick transfer in Iceland where we hopped off the plane, went through security, got some passport stamps, bought some snacks (skyr yogurt yum yum!)  got more passport stamps and then headed out to the second plane. Thankfully this one was nice and short, but the surly flight attendants were still in a bad mood.


We landed at Heathrow at noon local time. There was quite a long walk from our plane to the airport proper. There were a couple moments where we were pretty sure we were lost, but if you just keep trucking on, you'll get there. We got royally ripped off at the currency exchange, but we needed the cash ASAP to buy our Tube tickets. $200 USD to 108 GBP



The Tube cost us the grand total of 5 pounds to get from Heathrow to central London. What a steal, when a taxi probably would've cost us 80 pounds or more.


In total, I spent $1098 USD. Yay!

London in Under $1500: Intro

My whole inspiration for starting this blog is my vacation to London. I'm still in London as we speak, and loving it. Tons of friends back home have been pining about how broke we (as college students) are, and how much they want to go vacation on their own. Well, come one and come all!

 Four days into my seven day break and I'm well under my $1,500 (USD) budget, including airfare, tons of sight-seeing, tube (subway) passes, hotel, food, everything! I'll break it down day by day in the hopes that I can help out you, dear reader, so you can go on the trip of your dreams, too!

Cheap Girl's Guide to Blogging

Hello everyone! I'm Nora, and this is where I'm going to keep running track of all the beautiful *cheap* things in this world. All everyone seems to talk about lately is how expensive such-and-such is, or how much the economy sucks... but you know what? There are still plenty of amazing ways to spend your time without spending a lot of cash. I hope you enjoy reading my blog, and I look forward to seeing all the great tips you have as well!