It’s that point in the summer where even my kids are bored. After a hard year of school, they started out the summer wanting to do absolutely nothing: Sleep late, have sleepovers with friends, stay up late, not have to pack lunch, and spend every day doing whatever they felt like. Some of my fondest memories of childhood involve endless do-nothing summers so I resisted the urge to fill their days with camp so I could get lots of work done. Unlike them, I do have to get up every day and meet deadlines.
But boredom has recently taken on an irritable edge and it was time to schedule some activities. I recently did a phone interview with the founder of the Web site A Day’s Outing. It is a site that helps you find activities near where you are. So, desperate for something to do to get my teen and tween to stop bickering and living in front of a computer screen, I checked in there to see if it knew about anything in my town that I didn’t.
And, the answer was: Not really. But that’s only because I know pretty much everything that’s going on I this town. The site didn’t really miss anything and it was great to have it all gathered together for me. Ultimately, I sent the kids to camp and stayed home to work.
But next week we are going on a little family vacation. And this is where the site really helped. I have no idea what to do in the little beach town we are headed to or if there are any fun activities along the way on our drive up there. So I hit the site and within five minutes had a list of things I want to do and see next week. I was quick and saved me searching endlessly on Google for information. I wish it had links to the sites of the places it reviews but even without them it was super helpful.
There is even an iPhone app so that we can find things along the way next week when the kids start to fight in the back seat.