BEST Regionals. Or not.

So, here's the facts:
My robotics team can go to the BEST regionals in Dallas, Texas, which will be on November 12-13. But here's the problem- travel will cost us a massive amount of money. It's looking like several thousand dollars, and that's just for a few team members. Also, the best of the best are going to be there- not just us measly public schools, but private schools, and dreaded home-school robots. Some of our teammates argue that we might just be in for a dissapointment, and the money can definitely be put to better use- after all, we accomplished our goal of doing exceedingly well in state.

Besides that, there's a few choices for what we'll do later this year. Any of these choices cost obscene amounts of money that we just barely have:

FIRST National robotics competition- The national competition that inspired BEST, with a lot less limits (make our robot basically however we want). But it costs over $10,000 to enter, and materials for building the robot aren't exactly cheap either.

Personal Robot- One of our mentors suggested that instead of competing, we set our own goal to create a robot to autonomously, for example, drive around a residential block. Sounds like lots of fun, and doesn't cost much money- we have lots of parts from previous FIRST competitions, I've been told. That's hopefully what we'll end up doing.

Any thoughts on that, folks?