Maybe it's because I had five children of my own but I don't really find traveling with kids, at least not within driving distance, difficult. I have also traveled by plane with four kids and four cats so I know that's a totally different story. But the vacations that my family and I now take together are pretty much within driving distance. During the spring/summer we go to Carlsbad or Oceanside to hit the beach, and in the fall/winter we go to Las Vegas so we can gamble and drink (not really). These are our vacations of choice, at least for now while there are three relatively young children in the group.
The oldest four are old enough that we could take a vacation that requires flying, but since we would not be able take the little ones with us, we all prefer to take these smaller trips. The point of these vacations is that we can all go together, if not there wouldn't be any point.
Last month we took our little vacation to the beach. We stayed five days at a hotel very close to Oceanside Harbor, one of our favorite places. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Oceanside Harbor last spring and really loved it because it's incredibly family friendly and the location could not be better. The room capacity is 5 (important for large families) and kids pretty much stay free, which is really important when you're traveling with six children. The most convenient thing about this hotel is the restaurant where kids also get to eat for free. We had two rooms so the only ones who paid for meals were the adults. Pretty good, right?
Normally the bulk of our travel budget goes into meals, but since staying at this hotel we've actually been able to cut that down quite a bit. Plus the food is not bad, we did go out a few times for other types of meals but the majority of the time we ate at the hotel this time around.
Our first evening there it was all about the pool. The hotel pool at this location is not very large, that would probably be the only con I have about this place, but at least they have one. Last year we stayed at a really nice La Quinta only a few blocks away from this hotel and there was NO pool at all. Talk about a buzzkill.
So the kids took to the pool to practice their swimming, two years in a row of swimming classes haven't done much for these kids, but they had a lot of fun. Vacation is all about the pool and the beach, so you can bet these kiddos had a great first day.
We ended the evening with a nice dinner and back to the room to let the kids play and hang out.
It was a very successful day #1 of our staycation.
