Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, if you’re a patriot, any presidential inauguration is an exciting event. The inauguration of Barak Obama is a momentous occasion. The 2008 presidential campaign was one of the most polarizing and gripping campaigns that the country has witnessed. Obama is taking the reins during a very difficult—and very critical—time in both American and world history. Obama’s entrance into the oval office represents the ending of an era… and the beginning of a new one.

The inauguration itself will be unique—according to the Presidential Inauguration Committee website, “For the first time ever, the length of the National Mall will be open to those wishing to attend the swearing-in ceremony.” Gone is the exclusivity of past inaugurations. You don’t have to be a politician, you don’t have to be rich. You can go to Obama’s inauguration for free.

There will be other free and open-to-the-public events, as well, including a performance by Aretha Franklin and a parade that will run from Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

(Now for the part that, unfortunately, isn’t free– travel and accommodations. But we’ll do our best to give you some money-saving tips):

If you’ve not yet made plans to attend the festivities, it’s not too late—you don’t have to miss out on this once in a lifetime event. If you don’t live within driving distance of Washington DC, check out Kayak.com for last-minute flight deals.

Yes, hotels in Washington DC will be full to bursting or, if you can find a room, it will be shockingly expensive in the days around the inauguration. However, Tripbase did some research and found that there are rooms left in nearby cities—some for as low as 69 dollars a night. Assuming a check-in date of January 19 and a check-out date of January 21, you should be able to find hotel rooms in the following cities (listed in order of proximity to Washington DC):

Annapolis, Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland
Richmond, Virginia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

OK, so there are rooms available in nearby cities. That’s just one part. What about the expense– to both your wallet and your time?

We researched exactly how far these cities are from Washington DC and approximated how much time it will take you to drive to the capitol from them. (Remember, these are approximate times—give yourself plenty of wiggle room for traffic or delays. Inauguration events kick of at 10 AM on January 19). We also figured out how much gas money it would cost you. Assuming that your car gets 25 miles per gallon:

From Annapolis: 33 miles, 45 minutes, $2.31
From Baltimore: 41 miles, 1 hour, $2.88
From Richmond: 106 miles, just under 2 hours, $7.34
From Philadelphia: 141 miles, almost 3 hours, $10.23

Setting aside the price of plane tickets– which don’t apply to everyone– what will attending this extraordinary event cost you? Let’s say that you go it alone– you spend 40 dollars round-trip to drive to and from Philadelphia. There you stay at a mid-range hotel, paying about 100 dollars a night (x two nights=200 dollars). You’ll pay another $20.46 round-trip in gas from Philadelphia to DC (and back again). Let’s say that you end up paying $20 for parking once you’re in Washington DC. For food, we’ll budget $50 a day, for a total of $100– which is on the high end (realistically, you could spend half that amount and still eat very well. See this guide on delicious but dirt cheap eats in DC).

The grand total? $390, and that’s probably an overestimation.

OK, so it’s not exactly chump change, and you definitely won’t find it beneath your couch cushions, but it’s a small price to pay to participate in something that will never happen again– Obama’s inauguration.

Are you planning on throwing an inauguration party? Reconsider. You’d probably spend at least $100 dollars on refreshments and food. Why don’t you ask three of four friends if they want to go to the inauguration with you rather than watching it at home?

Using the example above again: a group of four suddenly brings that 40 dollars on gas for the trip to and from Philadelphia to 10 bucks each. A 100 dollar hotel room plummets down to 25 bucks a night per person (so $50 a person for two nights). That 20 dollars of gas to make the trip from Philadelphia to DC, and back again, becomes 5 bucks each– and yes, that’s something you might be able to find underneath your couch cushions. That 20 dollars in parking becomes, again, 5 dollars each.

But let’s keep that high estimation of $50 a person for food (hey, there are great restaurants in Washington DC).

The new total? 170 dollars. Not bad.

Take that inauguration party to Washington DC. Sure it’s last minute, sure the hotels in DC are full, but if you want it, you can make it happen… like Obama did.

All photos from Flickr. Photo credits (in order of placement): Hope- Obama (Shepard Fairey poster) by Steve Rhodes; Washington Monument, National Mall, Washington DC by yeowatzup; Barack Obama by transplanted mountaineer; The White House by Scott Ableman.

While researching part one– There’s poo on your shoe!– of this travel scam series, I ran across a couple more travel scams that tourists should beware…

You want how much for that pot of tea?! Here’s one from China: English-speaking tourists are approached by “Chinese students” at popular tourists sites in Beijing and Shanghai, for example, who want to “practice their English.” Because this isn’t so abnormal, sans scam, the tourists aren’t on guard. The Chinese students then ask the tourists if they want to go for tea, or to see a traditional tea ceremony. Why not? Seems innocent enough, right?

Wrong.

The bottom of the tea pot leads to the bottom of your wallet– when you slurp down the last drop of tea, you’ll find yourself staring down the barrel of a big, big bill that adds up to hundreds of dollars. Said one blogger, who was a victim of this scam, “there seemed to be an extra zero on the total.”

And what is there to do? You don’t speak Chinese, they barely speak English. Most people just cough up the cash and move on.

The bus station scam: my travel mates and I fell victim to this one in Delhi. One of my travel mates had only two days before she flew back to London and was desperate to see the Taj Mahal before she left. We went to the bus station to get tickets a day in advance. As we approached the counter, a well-dressed man approached us (and, yes, alarms started going off in my head at this time) and asked us if we were going to Agra. One of my travel mates said yes. He told us that there were no seats left on the public buses, but hey, we were in luck! We could book a seat with his company. He promptly hustled us out of the bus station and into his travel agency.

“You guys,” I whispered under my breath as we were filing into the office just a stone’s throw away from the bus station, “the Lonely Planet warned about this. We’re being had.”

But my travel mate really, really wanted to see the Taj Mahal before she went back to London.

Despite my protests, we ended going on a “tour” the next day. It cost us double what going on our own would have cost… and we felt like we’d been kidnapped. The “tour” lasted over twelve hours and included not only the “obligatory” stop at an Agra marble store, but also stops at various Krishna-related temples and sites. At one of these temples, we were strongly urged to donate money (which we didn’t).

We were the only Westerners on the bus and the Indian tourists seemed equally appalled at being scammed– by Krishna worshipers, nonetheless.

This leads me to my last points…

Remember that you can be fleeced no matter where you are in the world. Just as the Indians on our “tour” were scammed in India, you can be scammed in your mother country. And not all travelers are fellow innocents– travelers can be scammers, too. Stories abound about tourists who have been had by other tourists.

With all this said, I wouldn’t recommend going through your travels overly concerned about scams and strangers. In fact, some of my best travel experiences (including sleeping in an old man’s bed in Syria) have involved total strangers. Travelers must walk a line between weariness and openness.

OK, now it’s your turn! Share your travel stories– good and bad– with me…

Travel scams run the gamut from elaborate and well-orchestrated (think Agra food poisoning) to simple (giving incorrect change back). Here’s a few I’d like to avoid:

There’s poo on your shoe! Some travelers say that this is a rite of passage in India, especially in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai. I think, however, that I can get to know the country quite well without fecal matter on my feet.

Here’s how this one works: the bleary-eyed traveler is walking around a busy, crowded area. Scam Artist #1 (hmmm, maybe we should call him Scam Artist #2) squirts some poo on your shoe.

Scam Artist #2 points it out to you. “Sir! There’s poo on your shoe!” Coincidentally, Scam Artist #2 happens to be equipped with everything needed to clean the poo off your shoe… for a price.

This begs two questions for us. First, what can you do? Not a thing, really. Chalk it up to bad luck, you’ve just been had. Chances are you won’t pay much for your impromptu shoe cleaning, so try to have a sense of humor about it (you have to admit, it is a pretty good trick).

The second question is: how did they get the poo into a tube to begin with? We’re not sure we want the answer to that one.

Those samosas cost how much?! This has to be one of the more outrageous Indian travel scams I’ve heard, in part because of how nervy and blatant it is: a Dutch couple visiting India were recently charged 10,000 rupees—the equivalent of over 200 dollars—for four samosas, the deep-fried pastry-stuffed-with-potato. That’s right, as in the snack.

What shocks us is that the Dutch couple actually coughed up the dough. (Read the full BBC story about the incident).

That reminds me of another food-related scam that can leave your pockets slim: the Taj Mahal (Agra) food poisoning scam. This one is a few years past, but you never know if and when it will resurface. In fact, when I was in India in the summer of 2007, several Indian friends cautioned my travel mates and me not to stay overnight in Agra and advised us to avoid the food and water there.

So, what was the scam? Allegedly, restaurants were serving unwitting tourists bad food. OK, you can get food poisoning anywhere in the world, but it didn’t stop there. In Agra, the restaurants were in cahoots with local doctors who then charged the sick tourists exorbitant fees for necessary medical treatment. The doctors then gave a commission to the restaurant.

Yikes.

Have you ever been scammed while traveling? Have you ever been a victim of the poo on the shoe scam? Share your story here…

Tripbase received an email from a friend recently: “I’m sorry to say I got laid off this week,” he wrote. Our friend explained that the company he worked for needed to trim 300,000 US dollars from its budget, and his position was one of many that were eliminated. “HR and I signed some paperwork,” he said, “and that was that.”

“I’m not overly upset,” he continued, saying that his wife and he have been wanting to leave Alaska, where they’ve been living for two years, for quite a while. “That’s suddenly a lot simpler,” he said. “It will take about two weeks to wrap up loose ends around here, and then we’re going to visit friends and family for awhile. We want to see loved ones and decide where to live.”

Our friend’s family lives in Puerto Rico, his wife’s family lives in Florida. While taking some time to rethink his career path, our friend and his wife will visit with both.

Sure, they won’t be paying for hotels, but it got all of us at Tripbase thinking about travel destinations with low overhead costs… places we could take a time out from the recession and size up our lives from afar.

I thought immediately of another friend of mine, a writer. He spends the school year teaching, but every summer, he sublets his places and heads to India to spend the summer vacation writing. Yes, the plane ticket is pricey, but the overhead is so low in India, he swears he saves money this way (and gains material, as well).

Sitting out the recession, or at least part of it, in India doesn’t seem like an awful idea to me. Why? Let’s do some quick math here. Bear with me…

Rent varies wildly throughout the United States, but just for the sake of argument, let’s assume an average of 1000 US dollars a month of rent, including electricity, water, cable, and internet. Of course there are other living expenses, too, such as gas and food, so let’s knock that average up just a bit to 1400 US dollars. Six months would cost you somewhere in the ballpark of 8400 dollars.

Now let’s compare that to the cost of spending six months in India.

Let’s assume that you’re paying ten dollars a day for your room (and this is estimating high– we’ve paid half of that in hostels in India). That’s roughly 300 dollars a month in overhead costs. What about food? Let’s budget something outrageous for India… let’s say 200 dollars a month. For 500 dollars a month, or 3000 dollars for half a year, you’re living in India! Even figuring in a plane ticket, you’re coming out ahead of what you’d be paying in the States or Europe.

OK, we know this idea isn’t for everyone. We know that some people have mortgages and families and can’t just pick up and run to India. But if you do have the flexibility and you want to take a breath before plunging back into the less-than-stellar job market, why not spend 6 months on the subcontinent, rather than 6 months sitting at home while the economy is stagnant?

Some other interesting travel destinations where we could stretch the dollar or Euro came to mind… one of us lived in Alexandria, Egypt for part of a summer and paid about ten dollars a week for a small room in a shared apartment. What about retreating to Egypt? Morocco? Thailand? Laos? Vietnam? Central America? Certain areas in South America are quite affordable, too…

Getting fired is never fun, especially in these uncertain economic times. But if you have been saving up for a rainy day, and you have a cottony cushion sitting in the bank, there might be a silver lining to recession-related job cuts.

Let’s be honest with ourselves… how many times have you sat at your desk fantasizing wistfully that you would be “let go” so you could have the time to do the things, like traveling, that seem to keep getting pushed aside for the sake of slaving away at a 9 to 5?

You haven’t?

It’s just me?

I hope my boss isn’t reading this.

Ahem. In any case, if you’ve got some cash stashed away, you can use this unexpected break in work to your advantage… instead of rushing headlong back into the shaky job market, you might consider picking a low-cost travel destination. Stretch your time and money out. Clear your head and reassess. Go backpacking in India or take a long trek through South America. Retreat to an ashram on the subcontinent or go spend a few months being a beach bum in Thailand. Have you always wanted to volunteer abroad? Now might be the time to do it.

You will return rich with experience and gifted with a new perspective on the life– and work– you left behind.

Next topic: Sitting out the recession in India.