Four Ways to Afford a Vacation This Year
By Stan K. McVay
Many Christian home school families seek vacation experiences on a very tight budget. THE FIRST WAY to afford a vacation is to take it in your own house. Make this a real vacation: have your mail and newspaper withheld, unhook the phone, and avoid all normal day to day activities whenever possible. Enjoy a different activity on each vacation day. Following is a possible schedule based on eight days from one Saturday to the next:
Day One - Film and Photo Day: Bring out your photos and home videos from your wedding day forward. This often humorous activity rekindles old memories and builds new ones.
Day Two - Family Worship: You're on vacation, so attend church at home with every family member participating: sing or play a hymn or worship song; preach a sermon; or read scripture, a poem, or a missionary or hymn origin story. Each person can share a special memory associated with a past church service. Have an extended prayer time where the whole family prays out loud for each individual.
Day Three - Listening Day: Listen to old radio shows and/or audio books. Your public library may have a large number of titles.
Day Four - Music Day: Expose the whole family to music enjoyed by parents and grandparents such as old hymns, pop, country, western, big band, classical, oldies, etc. The children can share their favorite music with the adults also. Again, your library may be a source of CDs.
Day Five - Family History Day: Invite grandparents, great grandparents, or great aunts and uncles over to share stories of their youth, including memories of such events as Pearl Harbor, World War II, President Kennedy's assassination, and the first lunar landing. They might also relate memories of meeting famous people. This would be the perfect time for the extended family to construct a family tree together.
Day Six - Family Film Festival: Rent three or four movies that have the same actor, actress, director, or theme; or that are based on books or plays by the same author or playwright.
Day Seven - Readers' Theater Day: Half of the family can read a play while the other half is the audience. Roles can be reversed for a second play. A variation of this would be reading a Bible story with characters and a narrator, making the Bible come alive.
Day Eight - Game Day. Your family can play a variety of indoor and outdoor games so that each individual can play at least one game that he or she particularly enjoys.
Your family may invent other types of days that can be enjoyed in your “in house” vacation.
THE SECOND WAY to afford a vacation is to take it in your own back yard. Borrow tents from relatives, your church, or from your home school support group and assist a friend in cutting or hauling firewood in exchange for small branches that can be burned in your campfire. If you do not want to blacken a spot in your yard, build your campfire on an inverted car hood that may be purchased at a salvage yard. Before building a campfire, inquire as to whether open burning is allowed in your neighborhood and never use painted or treated wood or wood burning on a car hood to cook with, as this could potentially contaminate your food.
If your land contains meadows or woodlands, you may wish to borrow or buy guide books or tapes that will help you identify birds and bird songs, animal tracks and sounds, wildflowers, trees, insects, or stars and constellations. (To link to sources for many of these books and materials visit our website: www.HSvacationEx.com and click on “vacation innovation.” You'll also find links to sources for games and readers' theater scripts as well as links to chamber of commerce offices throughout the U.S. and to each of the fifty state's departments of tourism, great sources of free information.) Your children will appreciate and enjoy the out doors more if they become familiar with what it contains. If your back yard is too small or you don't have one, you may observe many of these examples of God's creation at a local park, wildlife refuge, or nature preserve.
THE THIRD WAY to afford a vacation is by visiting points of interest in your own city or county. This may expand your vacation experience. You may take for granted the natural and historic sites in your local area, but your children may not even be aware of them. Snooping around your home home area may surprise you. For example, I was not aware until researching this article that there is a forty acre state owned lake in the county that I have lived in for nearly twenty years!
Many home school families yearn for a more traditional vacation in which everyone gets away for a week or two and enjoys new places and experiences, but they simply cannot afford to do so... until now.
This leads us to THE FOURTH WAY to afford a vacation. The Home School Vacation Exchange (HSVE), which is the first and only residential exchange program founded by Christian home schoolers for Christian home schoolers, is by far the most affordable.
It greatly decreases or totally eliminates two of the biggest vacation expenses: lodging and restaurant meals. It works simply: each HSVE member family trades houses with another HSVE member family for one or two weeks per year – all for a low annual membership fee which is the same whether you have a family of four, fourteen, or more! The membership lasts for one full year and begins the day a family joins. The best news in these uncertain economic times is that every family joining HSVE in 2009 will receive a full 50% discount!
The uncertainty of these times may be the most compelling reason to give your family this year something that is both priceless and permanent: warm vacation memories that will last a lifetime – whether from your front room, back yard, or hometown, or across five counties or five states.
