The Weekend Getaway Playbook: Plan Unforgettable Mini-Vacations Without the Big Price Tag

McCann Amanda is a travel writer and budget strategist whose work has appeared in Afar, Travel + Leisure, Budget Travel, and Outside. Over the past fifteen years, she has visited forty-seven states and thirty-one countries while rarely spending more than five hundred dollars on a single trip. Her approach to travel grew out of necessity during her early career as a newspaper reporter, when a modest salary and limited vacation days forced her to master the art of the micro-adventure. What began as a personal survival strategy evolved into a methodology she has taught to thousands of readers through her column, her workshops, and now this book.

Amanda holds a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and spent a decade in newsrooms before transitioning to travel writing full-time. That reporting background shaped her approach to travel content. She treats every destination like a story, interviewing locals, fact-checking claims, and digging past the surface-level attractions that dominate search results. Her work is characterized by a skepticism toward travel industry hype and an enthusiasm for the overlooked, the off-season, and the unexpectedly affordable.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, with a rescue dog named Cash and a collection of trail maps that has long since outgrown its designated shelf. When she is not traveling or writing about travel, she is planning her next trip, which is usually somewhere within a three-hour drive that she has never bothered to visit before. Her favorite weekend destination is whichever one she has not yet seen.