Category Archives: Travel

Resolutions 2012: Save a little from every paycheck for a cool trip

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Welcome Wine and A Spoon readers!  I’m currently in the middle of a series about my goals for the New Year.  I’m a bit of a goal-aholic, so I’m giving myself the whole month of January to yammer on about it.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  Regular blog readers ( all 3 of you), check out my guest post on Wine and a Spoon today!

Isn’t that beautiful?  I swear, you really can’t do better for an outdoorsy vacation than Colorado in the summer.  My husband and I love to travel, but between a kid, 2 full-time jobs, and limited finances, we don’t get to go exploring the world nearly as often as we would like.

Of those three factors, I figure the money thing is the one that I can actually make a change in.  (Since I’m not looking to change my parental or employment status!)  My second resolution for the year is to put a small, set amount of money from every paycheck into a savings account for travel.  This might not completely fund a trip, but having a little nest egg to cover a big travel cost, like hotel room or plane tickets, would be really nice.

I’m not leaving this resolution up to chance every time payday rolls around.    I’m a long-time (completely volunteer) cheerleader for ING Direct savings accounts.  I recently set up an automatic savings plan to slurp that money away each payday before I even have a chance to try to spend it.

Since my budgeting method is to pay all my bills and spend what is left, adding in a travel savings account as a new “bill” actually works pretty well.  I just have a little bit less money to spend on Jimmy John’s Beach Clubs, trashy pop/dance music on iTunes, and the Banana Republic sale rack.  (It took me a while to come up with my spending vices – I really am a pretty frugal person – but I think this encapsulates them nicely.)

Now all I have to do is sit back and watch my pennies pile up!  (And keep my paws out of the honey jar.)

Weekend in Review

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We spent the long 4th of July weekend at a relative’s lake house just across the Arkansas border on Table Rock Lake. We had a nice time vegging out and not really doing anything. It worked well that this was the plan because the weather was either way too hot for the baby to be outside (90+ degrees) or rainy most of the time we were there.

The view was lovely though, and sitting on the deck overlooking the lake to eat breakfast each morning was very nice, too. I read two books (The Gentle Art of Domesticity and The Five Love Languages) and got a good start on two more (The Lacuna and The Christian Atheist) — why yes, my reading preferences are a bit ADD.

We went into Eureka Springs one day and got zero pictures, but we did use a tripod that we found in the lakehouse to get some nice family pics out on the deck. We grilled out every night and made big yummy breakfasts each morning.

All good so far… except there was a baby in tow. All the rooms were really bright (big windows to showcase the lovely views) and loud at night (fireworks) so we ended up setting up the Pack-n-Play in the laundry room, which was accessed through a bathroom. The strange bed plus strange location plus strange smell (laundry-soapy) did not make for a very restful baby. I was up 2-3 times a night to nurse him back to sleep – and of course the most convenient place to do that… you guessed it, sitting on the toilet (with the lid down of course!) Not very comfortable, much less at 2 and 4am.

And to that a baby that didn’t want to nap unless one of us was holding him, and you get the idea that this was not the most restful vacation ever. We actually planned to stay until Wednesday or Thursday but ended up leaving Tuesday morning as soon as we got the place cleaned up.

Luckily once we got back home, we got back to a better routine of naps, etc. so I’m hoping tonight will be a good back-to-normal sleep night for Mr. Josiah.

Note to self:  take a grandparent on the next trip so they can share in the baby-holding duties!

Arkansas-bound

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Hello there, faithful readers!  (Yes, all 5 of you.  3 of which are related to me.  Anyway…)

I owe you a 3 month post about Josiah, but what I am really thinking about these days is my upcoming vacation!  This will be a new kind of vacation for us, since we’ll have a 3-month-old in tow (and quite possibly a travel trailer to haul all of his stuff, but that’s another story).  We decided to skip out on the family reunion in Florida and go for something closer to home and a little more low-key.  We’ll be staying in my aunt & uncle’s lake house in northwest Arkansas for about a week.  No cable, no internet, 15 minutes from the closest town… it could either be wonderful or mind-numbingly boring.  I have a feeling we’ll experience a bit of both during the week. 

We’re planning to sleep in (as much as is possible with a baby around), take naps (ditto), read (ditto), knit (okay you get the picture), explore the great outdoors a bit, hang out on the gorgeous deck overlooking the lake, and cook lots of yummy food.  I am also excited to be able to spend lots of time with Josiah, who is doing all kinds of fun new things these days.  Since I’ll have plenty of time on my hands, I might even write a few blog posts to put up when I get back! 

Vacation Day 5: ALPINE SLIDE!

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See those two tracks snaking down the mountain in the picture there? That’s the track for the Alpine Slide. You ride a little toboggan down the track, with only one handle for steering – push forward to go faster, pull back to slow down. (It wasn’t quite as exciting as I remembered as a kid, but it was still pretty fun – especially since I was getting really TIRED after all that hiking and biking the days before. We were ready for something less phys-ed, a little more recess. =) Plus, I found a Winter Park Christmas ornament, to add to my collection of vacation ornaments.

I knit almost a whole pair of socks while I was gone (that’s what 26 hours of driving in a week will get you!) I’ll take some newer pictures and post them soon!

Vacation Day 4: Mountain Biking Edition

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Okay, so we didn’t pick a very rough section of trail for the photo op, but I swear this was a pretty bumpy trail at times – at least for a complete newbie like me. We biked on a paved trail to Fraser, CO (about 2 miles from Winter Park) and went on some trails from there. I wanted to stay on the easiest trails (cause I’m a scaredy cat) but they were really ugly because a bunch of the trees had been cut down, so I braved the harder trails and it really wasn’t too bad. Matt and I were both exhausted by the end of our ride, though! He found some iPhone app that tracks your ride, and blogged it here.

One more quick vacation post, and I promise I’ll be back to my normal boring life. =)

Vacation Day 2: Snow Hiking Edition

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On our first day in Winter Park, I decided it would be fun to head back to a trail that I had hiked with my family when we visited here several years ago – Byers Peak Trail.

(Actually my dad almost tumbled down Byers Peak after we reached the top of the trail, but luckily my mom vaulted down the mountain and stopped him from rolling down the mountain. But, I remembered that there was a really good view from the top, so I thought it would be fun to go again.)

Anyhoo, we got to the trail and started hiking. Pretty soon we started seeing some snow on the trail. No big deal, it was easy to walk around. Then the snow covered the whole trail, but we were able to follow the footprints of a couple of other hikers that had gone through the day before. The snow got up to about our knees, and the dark clouds of an afternoon rainstorm started rolling in… we decided it was time to head back to the car. We heard there was a white-out snowstorm in Winter Park the day before we got there, so we didn’t want to get caught in a bad storm.

We didn’t have any flurries on the way down, thankfully. We headed back to the condo and had a relaxing afternoon of reading, napping, and napping before a homemade dinner in the condo and watching The Dark Knight.

I love vacation…