One of the biggest highlights of the spring semester for a Colorado Mesa University students is spring break. It’s a magical period of relief after midterms and the turning point for warm weather. As soon as break begins, everyone starts looking forward to the summer and starts to enjoy themselves more than they were in the beginning months of the year.

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As exciting as spring break is, fun trips and activities students love doing over the week off are generally more expensive than we would like. The stereotype of a college student’s spring break is a fun week of bikinis, beaches and beer in California or Florida. But, if we’re being honest, next to no one can actually afford to do that. Plane tickets, hotels and alcohol all cost money that we just don’t have. However, just because we’re all broke doesn’t mean we can’t have fun during our one week off.

As a broke college student who can’t afford plane tickets, my best friend and I are planning a road trip over the break. It’s a cheaper alternative to buying $200 plane tickets, but we are still getting to travel. If you go with your friends and split gas money, you can go all over for relatively cheap.

It’s a whole week of good music, friends, sightseeing, and fast food. You could go anywhere, there are no limits to a road trip other than time and how tired you get driving. Colorado is lucky enough to be fairly close to a whole bunch of cool things, like Yellowstone, the Dakotas, California and Las Vegas. If you eat cheap and split gas money, taking a road trip is a fun and cheap way to spend a spring break.

Another cheap option for a fun spring break, especially in Colorado, is to go skiing. Typically, ski resorts and hotels in the Rocky Mountains are unbelievably expensive, but there are many options and resorts that people aren’t knowledgeable about but are actually pretty cheap. The most popular ones that are cheap are Breckenridge, Sunday River, Whistler Blackcomb and the Bridger Bowl.

All of these ski resorts have different, less expensive options for hotels, lift tickets and restaurants, and all give the same fun skiing experience you would get with big mountains like Vail or Copper. The mountains themselves are a bit smaller, but still fun, and it’s a fair enough compromise for cheaper tickets.

Camping is also a fun and fairly inexpensive activity, but it varies a little more depending on where you go and the weather. KOAs and self-determined campgrounds are usually a good choice, but there’s nothing wrong with just hiking out super far into the woods and setting up a tent.

I wouldn’t recommend going anywhere with a lake, or really anywhere in the National Parks because they’re almost all overpriced. As long as the weather warms up enough you’d be okay with spending nights outside, camping is a great option. Going along with camping is backpacking, which is another cheap, time consuming and fun thing to do over break. It’s harder than the average activity, but it’s always a big adventure to have with friends or family, and honestly costs next to nothing to do.

If you do have enough money to fly out to a coast and get drunk all week on a beach, then have fun, and good for you. For the rest of us broke kids, these activities provide a few alternatives for a fun spring break that let us have enough money that we can still afford to eat every day.