As certified cheapskates, we want to be as economic as possible in most of our lives, and especially when we travel.  Our goal is to see as much cool stuff as we can, while not breaking the bank in the process.  So we cook for ourselves when we can, often stay at hostels, take public transit when possible, etc.

But we’ve discovered that you just have to accept a certain amount of “economic inefficiency” when traveling.  Indeed, sometimes it’s not only necessary, but welcome.

For example, even when public transit is available, sometimes it’s way better to get a taxi.  When we went to Germany a month ago for Spiel, for example, we arrived at the Essen bus station at like 9:30 PM after something like 14 hours of travel.  (Yeah, that’s longer than you should expect.  We couldn’t get airline tix to an airport near Essen, so we flew into Frankfurt and then had to take bus+train combo for about 4 hours.) Anyway, we were aware that Essen has great public transit, but at that point, we were just way too shot to try to figure it out.  Fortunately, a very nice taxi driver and €15 got us to our hotel.  We considered it money well spent at that point.  On the way back, we had the system much more figured out, and were able to get back to the Essen central train station (Hauptbahnhof) for about €3 total.

A much bigger example hit us just this past weekend, though, on our trip to Barcelona.

Like good, economically efficient and adventurous travelers, we had been staying in a lot of hostels in Spain, and so we had booked a hostel in Barcelona as well.  To date, they had all been great experiences.  We had been lucky enough to get private rooms in most cases, and often the accommodation itself was neat.  (We can highly recommend the HI youth hostel in Córdoba, for example.)  Typically, we saw travelers of all ages and backgrounds, from teenagers out on their own to families with small children to people our parents’ age.

Not so in Barcelona.

The place itself was physically fine.  A bit grungy/shabby, but in that “well-used” way, not the “unclean” way.  We ended up in a ten-bunkbed dorm room, which, in principle, we’re okay with.  We even had an interesting conversation with a French-Canadian couple who were in the room.  The place even had WiFi.  (For free, no less!  Much better than I can say for some uber-pricey posh hotels I’ve stayed in for work travel.)

The disaster started at about midnight, when we were trying to catch some sleep.  See, the problem with this hostel is that it’s smack in the middle of the tourist district of Barcelona.  And Barcelona itself is one of the great youth tourist destinations and party cities of Europe.  We thought that surely, in mid-November, we’d be well out of tourist season and it would be okay.  Nope.

We were the oldest people in the hostel — as far as I could tell, everybody else was between 16 and 25 or so.  And most of them were clearly there to party.  People were in and out of our dorm room for hours in the middle of the night (with luggage), there were loud drunken conversations in the hallway at 5:00 AM, the whole bit.  We cushy middle-class working types couldn’t sleep through it.  Worst night of sleep in a long time.

So the next morning, we wandered down the street until we found a nice-looking hotel, popped in and asked after a room.  Yes, they had a free room and it only cost about three times what the hostel did.  That’s actually about what we expected, so we jumped on it.  The hostel, of course, would not refund any of our money, so we were out that, but at least it was cheap to begin with.

But the new hotel was lovely, private, was still convenient to the tourist centers and public transit, had free WiFi, had a great breakfast, and, most of all, was quiet.

We slept fantastically that night.

Travel inefficiency, perhaps, but we decided that it was money well spent indeed.