Silly Ideas Parents Get

Parents get a lot of silly ideas about what will make their kids most happy on the next vacation. We have many people to thank for these silly ideas: marketers, opinionated friends, magazine writers and so on.

But if you spontaneously ask a child what would be really fun to do the next time your family has time to get away, how likely is it your kid is going to mention the same things you've heard about in advertising? In some cases, maybe your kids have beat you to the advertising and already know that life is meaningless without regular trips to Orlando. But if you challenge your kid to generate ideas of his or her own ("Don't just tell me what the TV said we should do next break, tell me what you think we should do") it can really open your ideas to what they most value.

Some time ago we weighed options for a three-day weekend. A strong contender was a three-day, two-night trip to a small city about 80 miles away. (A loose definition of staycation might include trips of this distance and we thought we might spice it up and reduce our carbon footprint by taking Amtrak.) But the winning option was a well-planned series of local activities: a children's class (on wildlife) at a local college ($3 per child), bowling ($15 for the whole family), a visit to a farmer's market (free, unless you count the produce we needed to buy anyway), a visit to a local recreation center/indoor water park (with a coupon, $17 for the family) and a trip to a butterfly house (normally $20 for the family, but we have a membership) and a free playground located next to it. After all this fun, the kids were so tired in the evenings they went to bed early.

What would the trip out of town have cost us? Probably $300-$400. What did the local activities cost us? About $100. Considering all variables, whether staying in town was the eco-friendlier option is hard to say (had we gone out of town by train, for example, we would have walked much of the weekend). But there's no question that staying local saved us a lot of money. It also helped us appreciate the wonderful area in which we live.

But in order to stay local, did we sacrifice some additional measure of happiness we could have earned by leaving town? Of course not. What a silly idea.