5 Ways To Have Way More Fun On a Road Trip (Especially With Kids) – My Vacation Shorts

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Taking a road trip is one of our favorite ways to travel.  Whether we set out from home, or fly to our destination and rent a car, road tripping is the best way to get an up close, personal feel for the places you are traveling.  You can camp, stay in hotels, or some combination of both.  Having the flexibility of driving a car around means you get to go where you want and when you want, without relying on tour guides or public transportation.
However, once kids enter the equation, some families give up on the road trip as a viable vacation option.  Maybe they’ve seen the Vacation movies too many times, or maybe they just don’t think they, or their kids, will enjoy being cooped up in a car together for hours on end.
Well, we at My Vacation Pants have taken many fun and memorable road trip vacations with our kids, and we’re ready to tell you our secrets to making the most out of your automobile-assisted adventures with the entire family.

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The Ultimate Vacation Planning Guide – My Vacation Shorts

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As we are about to embark on one of the biggest family vacations of our lives, I have been reflecting on vacation planning practices that we do before we go on a trip.  We are about to travel to Europe for a month, which obviously requires some major planning, and I am trying to find a balance between getting things done in my day-to-day life and getting ready for my upcoming trip.  It’s tough, but I have some tried and true methods that make sure the planning goes, well…according to plan.  Here are a few of them, so you too can have peace of mind before you head out on your epic vacation adventure.

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Put On Your Rhode Island Getaway Vacation Pants – New England Part 2

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My fam bam recently did a trip around the New England area and we spent a couple days in picturesque Rhode Island.  My husband and I are all about finding cheap airfare and then planning a vacation around that location.  We usually fly to the cheapest place we can find, and then do a little road trip loop around the area.  That’s exactly what we did for our most recent Spring Break Trip.  We flew into New York City (JFK) because the husband found airfare on Jet Blue from Palm Springs, California to JFK, for a ridiculously low $132 a ticket.  Of course we had to snatch up that deal.  We plotted a route that would start in NYC and take us to Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, (with a short drive through New Jersey), and back to New York City.  We spent two nights on a little island in Rhode Island.  How cool is that?  We stayed on an island in Rhode Island! Get ready to get all the hot tips you ever wanted on taking a very short trip in this very tiny state.  Make sure you check out my first post from this series below.

Put on Your NYC (In Two Days!) Vacation Pants – New England Part 1

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Taking the Adventure Route – My Vacation Shorts

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I am so excited to introduce my first guest post writer.  My husband, Phil, is pretty much the smartest human I know. He has been my editor on many of my writing adventures for about 20 years now.  I have shared with you how we are a family that travels on one income because we wanted our children to be with a parent instead of being raised by someone other than us.  My husband is a stay at home Dad and has been one since my daughter was born in 2008.  He is an amazing one at that.  In this first post by him, you will see the backstory to our whole traveling philosophy. Read on to find out how you too can choose to take The Adventure Route. Enjoy.

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5 Ways to Truly Relax While Vacationing- My Vacation Shorts

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How to Actually Rest (but still do stuff) While on a Vacation

I absolutely love to relax on vacation.  After surveying other friends and family members, I realized that many people don’t really know how to fit in getting some rest while traveling.  As a result, they don’t really want to travel because they just feel tired at the end of vacation, and then they are tired when they go back to work and their normal lives.  Read on to find out my tips on how to actually relax while vacationing.
It’s easier than you think. Number five will blow your mind!!!  (I put that in as a joke for my husband 🙂

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Put on Your NYC (In Two Days!) Vacation Pants – New England Part 1

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Family selfie at Lady Liberty

 

Well, I just got back from my amazing trip around New England, so get ready for a series of posts about my fantabulous (that’s totally a word) trip!  My husband and I are all about finding cheap airfare and then planning a vacation around that location.  We usually fly to the cheapest place we can find, and then do a little road trip loop around the area.  That’s exactly what we did for our most recent Spring Break Trip.  We flew into New York City (JFK) because the husband found airfare on Jet Blue from Palm Springs, California to JFK, for a ridiculously low $132 a ticket.  Of course we had to snatch up that deal.  We plotted a route that would start in NYC and take us to Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, (with a short drive through New Jersey), and back to New York City.  We spent two nights in NYC at the very beginning of our trip and did a whirlwind tour.  Get ready to get all the hot tips you ever wanted on traveling to NYC with two kids while staying on a budget.  Read on to find out how we did it.

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Put On Your Room Escape Vacation Pants – Southern Cali Edition

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If you know me or follow me on social media, you know about my most recent obsession…room escapes!!!  For those of you who don’t know, room escapes are entertainment venues that offer to lock you in a room (not literally, fire code is pretty important to follow) and you have a certain amount of time to escape the room by solving a series of connected puzzles and mysteries.  It is fantastic amounts of fun.  In this post, I will take you through a bunch of room escapes I have tried in Southern California (spoiler free, of course!) in hopes that you will jump on the bandwagon and try some of these out.  Here is my current So Cal directory of room escapes the I have tried.  As I try more, I will add to the list. Continue reading →

Put on your Louisiana Road Trip Vacation Pants

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From a recent road trip around the Sabine Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana – 2016

In honor of my little sister moving to Louisiana, I am writing this post about taking an amazing Louisiana road trip for, as always, DIRT CHEAP.  We found some unbelievably reasonable airfare from California on Google Flights, and just had to plan a little road trip loop around mostly Louisiana and Mississippi.  We went in March, but we came back in August and checked out Northern Louisiana as well.   Get ready for some amazing Louisiana (with some Mississippi on the side) style adventures.  Here we go.

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Put on Your Year in Review Vacation Pants

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Showing off my Redwood Tree Vacation Pants in the lovely Humboldt Redwood Forest in Northern California.

Well, it’s been a whole year since I started the ole travel blog and I decided to reflect on the last year of travel.  I am going to talk about the best place(s) we ate (sometimes it is too hard to choose one), the best place(s) we visited, the best place(s) we hoteled, and the best thing(s) we did.  Of course, I will give you an overall snapshot of our travels at the end of the post, so you can get some travel inspiration.  Sit back, relax, and make 2017 the year you get out there and travel in those vacation pants!!!  Hope you start planning that next vacay, stat!  Continue reading →