My latest vacation, I wanted to go back home for my birthday and do an epic mountain bike and outdoor event. Things like this can get spendy if you fly, ship a bike or rent one, rent a car, etc. But I did it like:
Transpo: Put my bike on the rack and drove 14 hours from Seattle to South Lake Tahoe. Couple tanks of gas in my big stupid offroad rig. :D
Lodging: Parents bought into a timeshare decades ago. I paid the cleaning fee which was $60 for the 7 nights.
Food: I basically had a 1 bedroom apartment so I bought pasta, rice, beans, oatmeal, bread and PB&J. And beer.
Entertainment: Every day would be get up and play some video games, then go outside and do some outdoors stuff (2 small bike rides, hiking, climbing, paddleboarding/beach, couple of offroad trails in my rig and a friend's jeep, diving into mountain lakes, etc.) then go back home for more video games, hot tub, beer. In my normal life I'm BOOKED from 5am-8pm so getting to be lazy and do almost nothing is AMAZING.
The big bike event cost me $75 in entry and a shuttle from the end to the beginning in the AM dark. Started at Mt. Rose on the tahoe rim trail and went 62 miles of epic views, sandy trails, technical boulder riding, ball busting climbs, stream crossings, full sun exposure in mid 90's temps, over 3 different passes including one above 9000 ft, and finally ending with a technical downhill trail (and a rock garden crash, haha!) as the sun was going down. This was 12 hours of pretty intense physical demand but mentally I was really enjoying the whole process while it unfolded. Definitely a high point of my life doing this one.
All told this was a little more than $500, and the value it brought to my life was WAY more than the cost.