Spending time with my husband is important to me but that doesn’t just mean sitting at home doing the same thing every night. We like to take a bit of time to together away from the four walls of our house without parting with too much cash or if we’re staying at home for our date we like to make a wee bit special.

Thrifty Autumn Date Ideas

1. Find your local museum or gallery and spend an hour or two having a good poke around. It doesn’t have to be the best museum in the land because let’s face it an hour or two in the pencil museum is probably hilarious. A huge percentage of museums are free to enter, so take time to search out the free places near you.
2. Free cinema screenings – I put together a whole post about ways in which you can get free cinema tickets.
3. Babysit for someone else – okay, okay this one might sound a bit of an ‘eh, what?’ but sometimes getting out of your own environment does you good. Offer to babysit for a friend, set up camp in their sitting room and once the children are in the land of nod watch a few DVDs and chomp through a bag of popcorn (I can heartily recommend Sainsbury’s Basics popcorn).
4. Make a flask of soup, bake some bread, grab a rug, wrap up warm and head to a pretty park for an autumnal picnic.
5. If you have a tent or can borrow one go wild camping. There are lots of places across the nation where you can camp for free – basic rules are a. stay only one night b. light no fires c. camp out of the view of the road and d. leave the spot as you found it. You can find lots of info about wild camping here.
6. Go for a bike ride together.
7. Recreate a special meal together, be it your wedding breakfast or the pizza from your first date – make it at home before getting cosy with candles.
8. Make Smores.
9. Light some candles and take a bath together.
10. Dogging? Nope only joking. Take a dog for a walk. Sounds daft but if you don’t already own a dog, borrowing a pooch for walk can proffer a good deal of hilarious situations.
11. Go foraging – autumn is the perfect season! Hunt down the last of the blackberries, sniff out the sloes and if you know someone with a lot of apples or pears ask if you can help unburden their load.
12. Spend an hour mooching around your local library together whilst picking out a book for the other person.
13. Find a good deal on a website like Groupon or similar daily deals website and go out for a thrifty meal to a local restaurant or even just a discount cup of coffee and a spot of people watching.
14. Dig out a board game (you can also pick them up for next to nothing in charity shops) and unleash your inner child with a round or two or Monopoly or even the classic – Scewball Scramble!
15. Wake up early, grab two cups of hot chocolate (apparently you can make amazing hot chocolate in the slow cooker over night) and watch the sun rise together. The further into Autumn you go – the later you can wake up for this one!
16. If you own a games console hold a tournament with a game you’ve never played before. You can hire games from libraries or even pick them up second hand from eBay, bootsales or charity shops.

Enjoy!

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