Around the Town Fun {Family Connections Summer 2012}
Once again I’m joining Aurie, Lisa, Amy, and Connie to share ideas for fun, family activities for the summer. We hope you’ll stop by every Wednesday to share in our theme or link up your own posts about great summertime fun for the whole family!
This week the ladies and I are sharing about Around the Town Fun and I’ve got some pictures from our recent family excursion to Bluebird Gap Farm. I’ve also got some tips on how to save money while planning simple summer adventures.
My number one tip?
PLAN your summer adventures! {grin}
This is the first year I’ve actually sat down and penciled out our summer plans and it’s made a huge difference! I say penciled out, because we’ve had to adjust something just about every week. But it’s much easier to just shift gears and go with Plan B if you actually have a Plan B.
This little local park includes farm animals, lots of chickens, ducks, geese, and other birds, a playground, and a pond.
And part of your PLAN should be a BUDGET! {ugh!}
You’re certainly welcome to take this as far as you want to with details. I just picked a number that we could manage with our monthly “fun money” and irregular income, such as monetary gifts, gift cards from Swagbucks, etc. and only assigned direct costs such as the purchase of our reading list books (and a few movies to go with them) and museum entrance fees to the “summer adventure” budget.
All our adventures this year are “staycation” type things, all “at home” type stuff. With a few daytrip ideas if we decide to swing over and visit the grandparents. But we’re not going to Disney or anything. We’re packing lunches and using our refillable water bottles and coming home in time for dinner.
They have some rusty old antique equipment, which you know Mr. Fix-It loved.
I printed 4 months of calendar sheets (June, July, August, September) and just started filling in commitments I knew we already had.Then I made a bucket list of things I thought would be fun. Then I looked up how much each on would cost–and started taking things off. {grin} Then I just assigned the things that were left to the days (mostly weekends in our case) that were left. Simple.
They have some beautiful educational gardens maintained by the Master Gardeners, with great composting displays.
I discovered that the Parks and Recreation Departments for the surrounding cities actually own and operate several properties and museums and have much better entrance fees that the privately owned and operated ones–like FREE. Bluebird Gap Farm is operated by the City of Hampton and it’s FREE. Awesome.
We also found the Virginia War Museum operated by the City of Newport News and it would only be $17 for our whole family of 5 to go. And Newport News has four other historic properties that they operate with similarly low admission.
And they had peacocks. My kids loved seeing–and hearing!–the peacocks.
And I discovered reciprocal agreements–do you know about this?
If you buy a membership at a museum, almost all of them have reciprocal agreements for free or reduced admission at other museums across the country. Seriously!
It turns out our zoo membership comes with free admission to over 100 other zoos and aquariums across the country–and 50% reduced admission on 50 more.
One barn had displays of more household equipment–like looms, sewing machines, an old stove, etc. It fit in great with our recent family read aloud of Farmer Boy and The Stout-Hearted Seven.
Our Virginia Living Museum membership comes with free or reduced admission to 230 other museums and science centers. Now I’m not saying that we’ll be using our VLM membership to trot over to the Science Discovery Center in Trinidad, but I looked and we have fun options by all 4 sets of grandparents, and both aunts now.
For the most part, everything is kid-friendly in height, with pictures and color everywhere.
And read the fine print! Some places offer a reduced “out-of-town” membership–which will reciprocate with your local attractions if you qualify. Usually you have to be outside of the immediately adjacent localities–so things within about an hour would normally qualify–and then reciprocate for free with your local places!
Now I’m not saying sign up for membership in Colorado and visit your museum in New Jersey. But we were looking at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond (because it’s close to the grandparents, only a day trip, and their Children’s Garden is waaaay more awesome than our local one!) and they offer a reduced “out-of-town” family membership because they assume you just won’t be using it as much–which we wouldn’t. (I have 3 specific visits in mind this year.)
But, I discovered that they reciprocate free admission with our local botanical gardens in Norfolk–and the Richmond out-of-town membership is less than the Norfolk regular membership. BINGO! We saved almost $50 and still get access to both for a whole year!
Our kiddos could have happily spent and hour or two just walking around the pond looking for frogs.
I’m so excited about some of the opportunities I’ve found just by sitting down for an hour or two with a calendar that I’ve actually started penciling more things into September and October when the weather lightens up a little bit.
What summer fun have you been up to lately? Link up a new or old post about your great summer family activities. Please keep it family friendly and link to you post, not your homepage.
And be sure to come back next week and join us. The theme will be Food Fun and I’ll be sharing about ideas for making your kitchen a little more family-friendly.
Great ideas for planning summer outings! Thanks for reminding me to plan some fun trips. Your boys looking for frogs makes me smile! 🙂
They’re always on the hunt for something they can catch! 🙂
We are all about reciprocal memberships 🙂 We have ones with our zoo, children’s museum, aquarium and the science center. Now, for the science center….we bought the membership when we were in Buffalo visiting my mom. It was almost $90 cheaper than the membership to the museum in Philly – but it’s reciprocal, which means we get into both for free 🙂
It’s seriously awesome when you find deals like that!!
It makes your budget stretch a lot further! And I love that now I know all kinds of activities in areas we visit often, like around my sister’s house.
What a great idea to go to other museums that have free or reduced admission because of another ticket. I’ll have to look into that in my area, to see how I can save money that way. Entrance fees can really add up otherwise!
They do really add up, so I’ve tried to be selective, but I think it certainly adds huge value to the annual membership fee. Now we have basically free activities in most major cities that we would visit.