We made this year's trip a couple of weeks ago. One of my online readers took exception to this after my column last week, when I wrote about how the economy was affecting the financial situation of families including my own. She suggested we forego the trip.

Brad and I have a special way of saving for this annual trip, as well as little emergencies that require extra cash -- each night we take the change out of our pockets and put it on the coffee table beside Brad's chair, over the course of the evening Brad separates the change and puts it in little cans and puts them away.

Through the years, we've made several special trips, bought a couple of appliances and have taken some special vacations including a trip to Virginia to see my oldest son -- in addition to the annual hunting trips to Wyoming -- using that money.

This year the trip cost us $400. We purchased 7 permits at the cost of $34 each. The cost of our accommodations was to provide the food for our friend, a gracious host, and ourselves while we there. I processed the meat when we got home and will be making our jerky and sausage, so the cost of the meat was about $1.75 a pound and we now enjoy a full freezer.

The only meat I've gotten lately for that price is chicken.

I realize that during hard economic times, it is important to cut back, to make do with what you have, as one reader put it to "cut back to the bare minimum." But it's also important that we have some kind of normalcy in our lives; that no matter how tough times are, there has to be something to look forward to.

For those of you who were rooting for Brad to make the trip on his own, I would like to point out that he invited me, in fact, his comment was, "I want you to come!"

And I'm glad I did. Sixteen hours on the road and three days away from home gave us some alone time we haven't had in a long time. While I did spend most of the time going up there and most of the time going home, lying in the back seat of the truck it was still nice to be together.

While we were standing in line to purchase our permits on Thursday, a gentleman who was in line behind us invited us to hunt his property next year. He asked us to bring some extra hunters since the antelope were lined up shoulder to shoulder on his property.

So it looks like we'll be making that trip again next year.

You can't argue the economics on this one. And with extra hunters to share the expense of the trip, the cost of the meat will be even less.

I'm really glad we made that trip; I wasn't looking forward to eating chicken for the next year.