Tag Archives: travel

How to Pack for Overnight Summer Camp (with FREE Checklists!)

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Well, it’s summer camp time again! The time when I buy new socks and boxes of Ziploc bags and start the sorting and organizing for the kiddos to head out to church camp for a week. Do your munchkins go to overnight camp? Our kiddos head off for a week each summer with their church group. Sometimes the different age groups go at different times, but this year all 3 of our farm kids are heading off together–that’s a new stage for us! {smile} Our first year I did a … Continue Reading…

DIY 50 State Passports…with FREE Printable

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One of the special projects I did when planning our spring break trip was making fun 50 States passports for the kiddos to get “stamped” as we traveled. It wasn’t that hard, and I’ve got a free printable for you if you’d like to try it yourself. I found a lot of ideas and a few awesome templates on Pinterest, but I didn’t want to mimic a real international passport too much. The Ladybug just got back from a mission trip and we spent a lot of time emphasizing (and re-emphasizing!) … Continue Reading…

Easy DIY Luggage Tags

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As I wrote last week with our Summer Camp Packing lists (did you download your FREE copy?) our kiddos have been adventuring away from home a lot this summer. They visited my sister, my mother-in-law, and now church camp. This is Speedracer’s first year at church camp and we’ve developed several little rites of passage for the first year. One is that they get their first toiletry bag (or shaving kit bag for the boys) and one is that they get their personalized luggage tags. This is an easy and … Continue Reading…

Visiting Fort Boonesborough State Park in Kentucky

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About 2 weeks before leaving for our road trip, the boys and I watched the premiere of the new Men Who Built America–Frontiersmen series. Episode 1 was about Daniel Boone leading the first group of permanent settlers through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. The settlement was called Fort Boonesborough, and it played an interesting role in the Revolutionary War. Since we were getting ready to leave for our trip, and Kentucky was already on our route, we Googled “Fort Boonesborough.” Turns out there’s a state park (with camping!) at the … Continue Reading…

Packing Light for Scotland in Spring…Lessons Learned for Carry-On Only Travel

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We decided to travel carry-on only when we went to Scotland for a week last month. We ‘re used to traveling pretty light, sharing a bag, and we weren’t trying to go extreme minimalist. We just didn’t want to check any bags. I’ve had my luggage lost. Not fun. With carry-on only travel, they can’t lose your luggage. Also with the flight delay fiasco we faced trying to get to Scotland, not having to worry about any checked baggaging was a H-U-G-E relief! But there were some real challenges too. … Continue Reading…

Have Dog, Will Travel…Gear for the Dog Adventurer

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When I was in college, my Kenzie-dog traveled everywhere with me. Everywhere. And if you’ve read here very long, you know that we take Penny with us when we go hiking and camping. Then there’s Coal, who’s already covered a lot of miles since completing his puppy shots, (please be careful where you take your pup before his/her shots are up-to-date!) with many more to go! If you’re one of our regular readers, you also know that (except for books!) we tend to pare it down to the essentials when it comes to … Continue Reading…

Packing Light for Scotland in Spring…a Plus Size Capsule in a Carry On

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We’ve been asked several times what we packed for Scotland and how wet we got–especially since we packed light and went carry-on only. Well, we didn’t get wet at all. {smile} They had an amazingly clear, dry, spring heat wave while we were there. We packed for chilly, soggy, weather and ended up needing more tee-shirts and zero rain coats! Packing light for Scotland in the spring can be extra daunting for plus size travelers. The unpredicable weather and bulkier clothes can seem impossible to fit in a backpack! But … Continue Reading…

Carhartt to the Rescue…Thanksgiving Travel Adventures

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So, everyone knows our kiddos are the Carhartt Crew, right? The stuff keeps up with them when nothing else can! Our munchkins have been wearing and passing down brown, hooded Carhartt coats since the Ladybug was in a size 2T and we have enough $8 winter hats to outfit all farm visitors at chore time. {smile} Well, over the holiday weekend, we had yet another reason to sing their praises (if you’re squeamish, you might not want to read this)… Speedracer gets carsick. Like, wake up from a sound sleep … Continue Reading…

Facing Fears

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We’re on vacation.  Here… It’s lovely.  It’s fairly peaceful.  The kids are loving it. L-O-V-I-N-G it. I’m scared to death.  The beach is just a steaming hot stretch of danger zone to my poor mother-heart.  Drowning, sunburn, heat stroke, kidnapping, distracted drivers, stinging jelly fish…it’s something I’ve intentionally avoided for 6 years now.  We live within minutes of the beach.  Within a hour or two of several beaches. Great beaches. I’ve refused for years. It took Mr. Fix-It’s sister buying a beach house before they could brow-beat me into facing … Continue Reading…

The Boldness of Youth

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We were at the beach for a couple days, so our first day out the kids were a little hesitant.  The waves were pretty big and strong–especially for those of us under 3 feet tall!  And they were new to this whole moving water thing.  Swimming pools don’t chase you and knock you down and suck you back in, ya know.  They played in the water (especially the Ladybug, who had better size on the boys) and mostly on the sand, running down to the edge to fill their buckets. … Continue Reading…

How to UnPlan Your Next Family Road Trip

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Our recent spring break road trip adventure was 10 days and 4,000 miles together. We had a great time and are already plotting our next trip! I say “plotting” and not “planning” because this was a very (very, very!) loosely “planned” trip and I’m sure the next one will be too. Our family likes to call our NOT-AT-ALL-PLANNING style of planning “being flexible.” {smile} Everyone keeps asking me how in the world I planned our awesome trip…well, in my mind, I didn’t. We laid out a very basic route with a few … Continue Reading…

10 Road Trip Car Activities for the Whole Family

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At the beginning of our series of Road Trip posts, I mentioned that we are really looking forward to a fun, relaxed, vacation-feel to our travels. So most of our planning focused on two points… #1. Fun, simple activities while we’re IN the car! #2. Not being IN the car the whole time! I already shared about the individual road trip travel activity cases that we made each kiddo for some of our car time. But in our family, we have a couple of reluctant readers, who just also happen … Continue Reading…

Road Trips to Nowhere Just for Family Fun

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So, in just a week or two we’re loading the crew up in the truck and heading out on a 3,000-mile journey to nowhere. Sound crazy? Which part? The 3 kids in a truck for 3,000 miles in 8 days, or the journey to nowhere? {smile} We’re excited. It’s been a long time since we took a family vacation. Ok, we pretty much never have. We travel to visit family and call it a vacation. We go to parties, family reunions, the beach, all that family stuff–which we totally love, … Continue Reading…

Family Road Trip Journal Using Smashbooks…Free Printable Travel Journal Page

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Did you read that we’re going on a family road trip? Yep, and we’re excited about all kinds of great family moments. (And probably a few squabbles that we’ll live through just fine as well.) My normal operating mode would be to make each of the kiddos their own travel journal to fill out along the way and fact sheets and worksheets for them to do while we go along. There are tons of great free travel journal printable ones on Pinterest like this one, this one, and this one. And … Continue Reading…

Family Road Trip Travel Activity Cases for Kids

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So…we’ll be spending the week of Spring Break traveling in the truck…with the kiddos…for 3,000 miles…YEAH! We actually ARE really excited about our family road trip vacation–in case that first sentence came across sorta sarcastic. I wrote it like that on purpose, though, because a lot of folks really do react like that to the idea of 10 days of travel, in a car, with 3 kids, basically going nowhere. But we’ve put a lot of thought into making this a fun adventure since we came up with the idea … Continue Reading…