We love to travel, and we've done it all different ways, from the super cheap to the semi-luxurious. The cheapest way we've found is to drive and then camp in state or national campgrounds. We throw a tent in the car with sleeping pads/bags, and some simple cooking gear. A cooler is a must. You can get ice anywhere, and stop for groceries when you need to re-stock. We eat out of the cooler for the whole trip. Restaurant stops are budget killers. On long trips we throw in a hotel stay here or there to clean up better, do laundry, etc.
Car camping works even for far away destinations, with a little more planning. Several times we have used points (from a credit card churn) to book plane tickets to a destination and rent a car, then we did our regular car camping thing. We just threw the camping gear into our checked baggage. (Which is no additional fee because we have a frequent flyer account with that airline). One example: We did a two week vacation to California a couple years ago with our kids using this fly-and-camp method. After two days in San Francisco (used points for the hotel) we hit the road and stayed at Yosemite, Redwoods, and a couple of state parks. Total out of pocket cost for the trip was about $900 for our family of four, which covered food, gas, and campground fees.
We also did this same churn-fly-drive-camp method to travel to Utah, Mesa Verde, and New Mexico on the cheap. You can fly with a cooler, btw. Most airlines will accept it as a checked bag.
If you don't want to camp, churning can still help you get airline tickets, car rentals, and hotel stays. Have you read up on credit card churning, a/k/a signing up for cards to get the points bonuses? There is a bunch of info on that in this forum, and also online. That's how some people get travel costs down. It can work well if your spending is at a level where you can meet the minimum required spend easily, or if you know you have a large purchase coming up that you are going to make anyway. If you are at super low spending level, and no large purchases coming up, then credit card churning is probably not a good fit.
Last tip -- AirBnB is a good option whenever you stay in an area longer than 4 days or so. (That seems to be the tipping point at which it makes more sense to rent a place than stay in a hotel). If we know we are going to be in a place for at least that long, we find a place to rent.
Tl;dr: Car camping and credit card churning. Have fun!