My family loves to travel. This year we’ve traveled to Nevada, San Diego, St. Louis, Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri, and Saugatuck, Michigan plus we have two more trips planned before the end of the year.
But as much as I love to travel to new places, some of my best memories of this year have taken place close to home: visiting the whale exhibit at the Field Museum, watching the kids ride a zip line at a nearby farm, watching an ice cream sandwich drip down my son’s face at the pool, and petting a skunk at a local historical center.
I’ve been more aware of my surroundings since I’ve had kids. When they were little, everything was so new. They pointed out stores and buildings that I had never noticed before. I started to realize that there were places and areas within my own hometown that I had never even seen before. I’ve been planning trips to far off places when I hadn’t even fully explored my own backyard.
So I decided to make a plan. We would take a week and become tourists in our own village. I’d plan things out just as I would if we were going someplace I’ve never been before.
Here’s the checklist I’m using to plan my week’s travels in my own village.
1. Go to my village’s website. I looked up any current events that would be happening in the next month. Depending on the size of your town, the site might also list the main attractions in your town, local businesses or places of interest.
2. Find out the boundary lines of my village. I found the city-data site to be very useful for this, if you live in the US.
3. Google my village. I think you might be surprised at what you’ll learn about your own hometown simply by doing this step.
4. Read up on the history of my town. Wikipedia is a good place for this as well as your town’s own website. I learned some interesting facts, and it gave me some ideas for places I might like to visit.
5. Skim through the white pages of your phone book or go to the white pages online. I made a list of some categories we were interested in: toys, animals, books, building, geography, and climbing. Then I looked for local businesses that might have something to do with those interests. I also kept an eye out for other businesses that looked interesting, too. I looked for places that we had never been to before.
6. Drive up and down the main streets of my village, searching for places I’ve never been to before and listing three places that look interesting.
7. Make a list of restaurants in my village that I haven’t been to before.MapQuest was pretty useful for this.
8. Go to tripadvisor.com and uptake.com.
9. Check out any free classes, seminars or workshops at your local park district.
10. Check out any other cultural offerings going on in your town.
Armed with a lot of new info, I’m going to take one week and “tour” my village with the kids. I’ll report back on how it went in a few weeks.
How would you go about traveling in your own backyard? Have I missed any resources that might help me plan my trip better?
Photo credit:malias
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