Attending a great hen party, without smashing my budget (122-243)

Yesterday was my sister’s hen party and for such an important event I’d made sure I’d given myself a decent budget! I’m extremely grateful that my sister decided to have a fun day and night with her friends that did not cost the planet, and that the craze for ever-more far-flung, out-doing each other, and, thus, extremely expensive ‘hen weekends’ seems to have finally died down after the UK hit the recession! Thank goodness for that; it was always a major dilemma in the past to be asked to spend 4-5 hundred pounds on a friend’s hen weekend when I valued their friendship but just did not have a spare £500 – and if I had I would much rather have spent it on a holiday with my husband than on a long weekend with lots of women I didn’t even know.

So yesterday the 10 of us ladies headed off to Chessington World of Adventures in our matching (tasteful!) ‘hen party’ t-shirts that conveniently had the rides listed on the back so that we could tick them off as we went round (pens in our goody bags!). After a fantastic day of adrenaline rushes, and a severely sore stomach after all the shrieking/laughing I was doing while being catapulted around numerous rides, we headed back to my nearby parents’ house, put on our glad rags and then set off for a delicious meal at Pizza Express, followed by silly games etc back at my parents’ (thanks parents for generously lending us your house!).

It was a really great day, with some lovely girls (no bitchiness in this group luckily!), and I had so much fun. Best of all, however, was that, through a process of everyone having worked hard to find 2for1 vouchers (for both Chessington and Pizza Express), and my dad and aunt generously paying for lunch and the wine at dinner respectively (thanks!), I ended up coming in under my allotted budget and only spent £40 on the whole day (plus £10 petrol travelling down)! Fantastic value for money and, most importantly of all, the hen thoroughly enjoyed herself.

~ by diaryofadebtor on May 2, 2010.