FAMILY VACATIONS

Our blogger friend Lucy sends us some good tips from the Dollar Stretcher website for taking a vacation-for-less. She has me remembering great family budget vacations.

First, my mother could squeeze a dollar til the eagle grinned..........coughed, choked AND sputtered. We traveled by car on our family vacations and often wondered what those building were that we saw along the way. They had lots of cars parked out front and they had flashing neon signs that read EAT!. Those signs did not attract our parents. The signs that said Road Side Park caught their attention.

Mother always artistically packed a picnic basket for long trips. She used dry ice to keep things cool. No disposable paper plates or cups. Mother packed plastic washable dishes. We ate roadside cereal at breakfast time and roadside sandwiches or chicken or fruit salad at lunch and/or dinner time. It was magic the way mother could fit everything into that basket.

If a journey was long enough to require a motel stay, we drove around a town looking for a vacancy sign and with rooms at the lowest cost. However, finding an inexpensive motel wasn't the whole requirement. Mother had to inspect each potential room and if it was not clean, we drove down the road until we found one that would pass her white glove test.

Those are fun memories of my childhood vacations. My brother, sister and I can actually recall the pleasant meals at picnic tables and remember the beautiful outdoors that made the cereal and sandwiches taste like royal fare. We can also remember hiding in the backseat of the car pretending we were NOT with that lady inspecting the motel rooms.