Travel Tips and Strategies Archives - Page 12 of 13

May 18 2010

Five Fun Family Vacation Activities Your Kids will Love

Summer camp

As summer quickly approaches, many families are finalizing summer camp and family vacation activities for their kids. Most kids if given the choice would probably opt for family vacation time over camp any day of the week. And why not? It is an opportunity to spend fun quality time with their parents and create new memories, and perhaps, regular traditions.

The thing I love about children in general is, for the most part they are easy to please – especially when it comes to vacation activities. Show them some sun, some water, an amusement park, summertime food, and they’re pretty happy. They’re not too picky on how they get there, as long as they get there. They may complain a little about travel time, however, if you keep the anticipation up, they can’t help but squeal in their pants.

Here are 5 family vacation activities that your kids will love:

At-home Water Park: As much as we’d like, we can’t get away to a water park every weekend of the summer. So why not create a water park at-home? Buy a couple of water slides, hook them up to your water hose, invite a couple of your child’s buddies, and watch your home turn into the local water park. If you’re one of the lucky souls to already have a pool in the backyard, that’s even better! Fire up the grill, turn on some music, throw some water toys into the pool with your kids and their invited guests and watch their faces light up. You will instantly be “Cool Mom of the Week” and your house will be known as party central.
Themed Day Trips: Kids love to role play. Try dressing them up according to the theme of the day trip you’re embarking on and take their day trip to a whole other level. For example, take a wilderness walk/hike or a trip to nearby caves or caverns. Have your child pretend to be an explorer, complete with an Indiana Jones inspired hat. Dress them up like a farmer and visit a local fruit and vegetable farm that allows you to pick your own produce. If your child loves race cars, dress them up like a race car driver and have fun with Go Karts or take a trip to a race. If you’re looking for something even more educational, take your kids to a nearby battlefield and give them a history lesson, complete with some sort of military inspired paraphernalia..
Weekend Trip to an Outdoor/Indoor Water park: So If you’re really not interested in the hassle of set up and clean up and you have the funds to make it happen, take an overnight trip or a weekend trip to a local water park. If you’re lucky enough to live near Orlando, FL or Williamsburg, VA (or any other location fairly close to a Great Wolf Lodge), you can enjoy both worlds – indoor and outdoor water fun. Near the Williamsburg area, you can visit Bush Gardens or Water Country USA and then hop on over to Great Wolf Lodge for your accommodations and continued water park madness.
Annual Family Cruise: Cruising is by far one of my favorite ways to travel and enjoy family vacation time. Everything is right at your finger tips: water fun, entertainment, restaurants, childcare, and photographers. All you have to do is get to the ship. Theme-cruises such as Disney Cruises probably top the list of fun cruise ships as they have the most child-friendly offerings. However, many cruise lines have programs designed for kids and chaperones to help tailor the fun.
Packing party: To ease some of the stress from mom’s shoulder, try having a family packing party complete with music, pizza, and other treats. Packing becomes a fun family affair where the whole family packs their suitcases together and prepares for an upcoming family vacation. This exercise teaches kids at an early age that they too are part of the vacation preparation process. When they are older, they’ll be better equipped to independently pack because you’ve already made it a family tradition. This takes the stress off of mom and makes packing a family event.

Disclaimer: I wrote this blog post while participating in the Williamsburg Tourism and TwitterMoms blogging program for a chance to get a $50 gift card.

Feb 07 2010

Staycation: Travel In Your Backyard

After this weekend’s blizzard in Maryland, there was absolutely no reason to think about going up to a ski resort to catch some powder. We got tons of it – 30 inches in my area to be exact. This is the time where you say to yourself, who needs to pack up the car when you can just walk outside and create your own family fun….for FREE. That’s my favorite four letter word!

Sometimes we believe the more we travel or the further we travel, the cooler we are. The funny thing about that is, kids don’t care. You can create the same experience you travel and paid for, right in your immediate environment. All it takes is fun and imagination. That’s all they really want – is to have fun with their parents and use their imagination. Who needs a car, train or plane for that?

Jan 18 2010

Travel planning sin #1 – ignoring the forecast

One of the first things I normally do when I’m planning a short family excursion is to check the weather forecast for my current location and my destination.

This weekend, as I laboriously planned our ski day trip to Pennsylvania, figuring out who would take the two-year old on the kiddy snowtubing slope and who would drop the six-year-old off at ski camp before heading for some private slope time, I mindlessly forgot to check the weather. Saturday was a beautiful, unseasonably warm January day, ripe for any winter sport your heart could desire. I chose to run errands and do some shopping, taking for granted that winter days are as fickle as old-timers.

If I completed one simple task on my list, I would’ve postponed the shopping for my choice of one of the two subsequent rainy days of the long weekend. It made all the difference for our trip – we didn’t go on it! And in a military household where “ya just never know”, wasted days are like throwing money away – you can not afford it. The experience was a lesson learned in sticking to my travel To Do list – check the weather before you plan anything. You can save yourself a lot of time and disappointment.

Sep 26 2009

Taking Care of Yourself

One of the things about traveling that I tend to forget about is that it takes a toll on the body. I was kindly reminded of it this past week when my immune system said “nighty night” and shut down Sunday evening, mere hours after getting off the road from a weekend getaway.

The change in environment, introduction of new germs, lack of sleep, change in diet, exposure to more people are all leading factors to why we tend to get sick when we come off of a trip. I’d say the main factor is pure lack of sleep. It happens to me everytime. I go away, I’m pumped and excited to be somewhere other than the “4 walls” of my house, I stay up later watching t.v. that I don’t normally watch at home (although I get the same programming), and before you know it, “kachoo”, the first sneeze and accompanying sniffle make their way to the surface. Apparently it isn’t enough that I take Clorox cloths and wipe down various surfaces in the hotel room or that I travel with my own washcloth and sometimes my own towel or that I wear slippers in the room or flip flops in the shower or line the bathroom seat with paper. No, that’s not enough. Somehow, someway those sneaky bastard germs make their way through all of my other protective barriers and catch me through that one little crack…sleep.

Bottom line: I need to take better care of myself when traveling with my children. I make sure that they are in bed on time and that they’ve taken their necessary vitamins. I even try to maintain my workout schedule when I’m away from home. It’s just a challenge for me to wind down and go to sleep at a human hour…kind of like now. I was lucky this time around, getting over my sickness in a few days but it took discipline to do so. I went to bed before 11pm most nights this week; I didn’t workout before 6 am in the morning; I took either Nyquil or TheraFlu to have uninterrupted slumber; I drank 3-4 packets of Emergen-C a day coupled with double shots of vitamin C chewables; and I napped in the day, whenever my body wanted to say “nighty night”. I didn’t fight it.

Moral of the story: Go to bed! You’ll do your body good. Everything that’s there now will be there tomorrow. Traveling can be exciting and we may try to cram as much as possible into our schedules so that we don’t “miss anything” but what’s the sense in going away on mini-breaks or vacations if you come back sicker than when you left? None whatsoever.

So, on that note: Good Night.

Aug 28 2009

Expert by no means

Sometimes we all experience a little bit of hubris and think that we have a routine down-packed. We feel good about ourselves and take for granted the system that allowed us to be so successful in the first place. The layman’s term for this behavior is: “slacking”. The reason why successful business people are successful is because they stick to a credible and working system, day in and day out.

My major system for calming my nerves and being organized when I travel with my little men is using my TDLs, my To-Do-Lists. They work each and every time and for the most part, the major items on them don’t change – pampers, wipes, extra change of clothes, snacks*, Nintendo DS, towel, washcloth, etc. etc. But for some reason, for a weekend trip we took earlier this month, I lost my mind for a second and actually thought I was an expert at packing the kids up and hitting the road. While my husband was getting his stuff together (which is his only responsibility), I was running around the house sans TDL, grabbing items that I thought were imprinted on the front of my eyelids because I had done it so many times in the recent month. Tsk tsk tsk, mommy. What was I thinking? Between my husband asking me questions, my text messages buzzing away, my oldest son racing his cars back and forth on my hard wood floors, and my one year old opening and shutting my kitchen cabinets, how could I expect myself to remember everything? Impossible. Why didn’t I make a quick list or grab an old one? Who knows? To my frustration and dismay, I forgot my washcloths, our pool towels, my cover-up, a pair of my son’s swim trunks, my infant’s swimmers, and a couple other smaller items. By the time I realized it, we were already at our destination, so there was no turning around to get anything. THAT’s why I write TDLs – because when I’m traveling, besides keeping myself organized and on track, I HATE FORGETTING STUFF! Hear me when I say, it is one of my biggest pet peeves. And rightfully so, because I refuse to purchase something that I already have at home (unless it is a dire need) and therefore, I make myself suffer and do without it.

It is my belief that no matter how many times you’ve packed up your children and hit the road, and no matter how many times you’ve written out a TDL and may think that you have it imprinted on your forehead – if you stray away from that proven system which you established that allowed you to not forget anything and get out of the house in a timely fashion without having to return, you are bound to forget something.

I challenge you to try it next time. Try to pack up for a trip, day or overnight, without your TDL (if you’ve normally used it in the past) and see if you don’t forget an item. Let me know how you do. I’m just curious. I know that I’ve learned my lesson. And though I am one of the ultimate multitaskers, probably an overtasker, I’m definitely not a memory bank. And I take pride in that fact. Hey, I’m a mom, not a computer! I’m all for my brain working smarter, not harder.

*Here is a list of some “mommy snacks” that I travel with: sugarless gum, protein or granola bars, almonds, raisins, almond butter, water, baby carrots, mini pickles, mini yogurt cups, rice cakes, grapes, sliced apple, and the occasional bag of chips.

Snacks that I pack for the children include: crackers, apple slices, fruit cups, chips, fruit chews, juice boxes, water, pretzel sticks, granola bars, and anything else I see in the house that I consider grab-and-go.

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