When it comes to planning a family vacation, sometimes your dreams may be bigger than your budget, or even your energy levels. While you may want to cram two months of vacation into just a few short weeks, that is not always feasible. In addition, the farther you travel, the more time you will spend just traveling, rather than actually enjoying your vacation. That doesn’t mean every few years you shouldn’t go on a “big” vacation, but you don’t have to plan a big trip every year, particularly when you have small children. Here are three better ways to plan a smaller family vacation this year.
Staycation
The point of a vacation is not to travel to exotic locales, it’s to rest, relax, and rejuvenate in a more familiar area. Instead of spending half of your vacation traveling, why not explore your own city or someplace within just a few hour’s drive? You can still stay in a hotel and enjoy all the perks of room service, maid service, and in some cases even child care, but you will get to spend all of your vacation actually vacationing rather than traveling.
Go on a Small Road Trip
If you really want to venture a little farther from home, you can go on a mini-road trip. Once again, no matter where you live, there are almost always sights you haven’t seen – or haven’t seen in many years – within a few hour’s drive of home. For your mini road trip, you might consider renting a car rather than taking your own. Not only will it be far more convenient if you break down anywhere along the way, but you can either rent a bigger vehicle than your own, or maybe even a car you’ve always wanted to drive that just isn’t all that practical for daily use.
Split Up
While vacations with the whole family are great, you will most likely have eighteen or more years to make family vacation memories. If you have more than one child, however, sometimes what kids are missing, is time spent alone with one parent. You can still make great family memories by each parent taking a solo vacation with a single child or half the family. Just remember that every family vacation doesn’t have to be exactly the same, and sometimes the best memories will be of the year you did something really different.
There is no right or wrong way to take a family vacation, but the one important thing to remember is why vacations are important. Destination vacations are great, but they can sometimes overshadow what is truly the most important thing about family vacations: the time you spend together as a family.
