Generally speaking, I am a thrifty person. I take great joy in finding bargains. I don’t remember the last time I bought an article of clothing that wasn’t on sale, except for maybe socks or underwear or something.

That said, I do enjoy high-quality experiences in life, so I don’t mind splurging occasionally on an amazing meal or a travel opportunity. Still, even when I’m in a splurging frame of mind, I do try to find good deals. For example, we traveled to the Caribbean for our honeymoon during the off-season, and we were able to get a nice hotel for a reasonable price. Likewise, when we went to Norway, it was via a killer deal on plane tickets. We also rented an apartment instead of staying in a hotel for most of the trip, which cut costs, and when we had to be in a hotel, I found a discount club to join that knocked the price down.

All this is just background to help you understand my dilemma. I love to travel, and I’m not cheap, just thrifty. It pains me to pay a lot when I know that if I just looked hard enough, I could find a better bargain.

So here’s the dilemma.

As I may have mentioned, we have some weirdness in our flight schedule for our trip to Rome (but I shouldn’t complain, what with it being a free flight). We have an eight-hour layover in Stockholm on the way over, and we have to stay overnight in Copenhagen on the way back. That’s not a problem necessarily, because I’ve heard Copenhagen is very nice, but it raises the hotel issue. We’re renting an apartment in Rome (cheaper than a hotel! right by the Roman Forum!), but of course we need to find a hotel for the night in Copenhagen, ideally near the train station so we can get back to the airport fairly easily.

Denny is a big fan of modern design, and Scandinavian styles are generally very much to his liking. I found a hotel that looks awesome: right near the train station and Tivoli (ironically, also the name of a place near Rome we might visit), super-modern and cool looking, well-reviewed on my all-time favorite travel site, TripAdvisor. It also has a suite designed by famed Danish architect/designer Arne Jacobsen. The suite is probably too rich for our blood, but they offer tours of it if it’s not in use. The bad news: the hotel is pretty pricey.

I usually believe in the law of diminishing returns when it comes to hotel rooms. It’s possible to drop a gazillion dollars on a place to spend the night, but once you cross the threshold into the “clean and safe” category of hotels, you stop getting your money’s worth. I personally am happy at a decent hotel as opposed to an opulent one; I’d rather spend my money on food and museum entrance fees and possibly one of those leather jackets they have in Italy that are so soft you think you could eat them with a spoon. There are several other hotels in the same proximity to the train station that look like they’d be just fine, for a lot less money.

But on the other hand…we’re flying there nearly free. We’re renting an apartment instead of a hotel to save money. Rome isn’t an outrageously priced city. This is probably our last international trip for a long time. Maybe we should just go for it and have our last night be posh.

If pressed, Denny would probably say to go with the cheaper place. He is, ahem, thriftier than I am (though he’s not a cheapskate either). But I know he’d love it if we stayed at the cool modern place. We’ve discussed it only briefly, when I went downstairs and pestered him while he ran on the treadmill last night, so his opinion remains undivulged. Maybe I should just pay for it myself and consider it a birthday present for him.

What to do? The hunt for Danish discount clubs continues, though I suspect it might be hard to find one where it would be worth it for just one night. It would also be cool to find some kind of club where I got discounts on pastry danishes. Dream, dream, dream.