Budget Travel and a Check Mark on My Homeschool To Do List
Before Ray and I had children, my cousin Debby and her husband lived near Washington, D.C. We decided to visit them and take in the sights of Washington, thinking, “We had better do this before we have children while we can still travel.” In a few short years, we had three little ones. Mary Evelyn was just a baby. A friend invited us to go camping with them. The experience taught us that we could camp with a baby and was one stepping stone God used to give us a lifetime of adventure.
In 1985 we moved from Mississippi where Ray had been a campus minister to Illinois where he became the preaching minister. The next summer we decided that while we were living up north, we should take advantage of where we were and see some of what was up there. We chose Mount Rushmore (which is not exactly in the neighborhood of Urbana, Illinois). We bought a small pop-up tent, a Coleman stove, and a cartop carrier for our Plymouth Reliant sedan and took off.
We saw the monument (almost-three-year-old Mary Evelyn called it Mount Mushmore) and learned about how it was made.
We drove the Needles Highway, seeing the buffalo and other wonders in Custer State Park. We rode on a stagecoach, played in Rapid City parks, and had fun at the now-defunct Flintstone Village.
At night Native Nation dancers came to the campground and invited us to join in. That experience and the faces of Mary Evelyn and the young man dancing beside her inspired my commitment 25 years later to be diligent about telling the story of Native Nations in America the Beautiful and Uncle Sam and You, which has a unit on Native Nation government today. I felt at the time like I should say to him, “I’m sorry.”
This trip and my childhood experiences with my own adventurous parents taught us that we could travel on a small budget. The next year we went east. One day we set up our tent on a very windy beach in Delaware.
In 1991 the children and I made a map of the lower 48 states. We studied the regions of the United States that year and began our multiyear journey of coloring in states after visiting them, using different colors for each region. In time we told the children that we would keep on until we had taken them to all of the lower 48.
After adventures in campgrounds and inexpensive hotels, cheese and cracker meals while keeping on trucking, and volunteering for mission trips, we accomplished that goal in 2001 when we visited Louisiana and Florida when our kids were ages 22, 19, and 17. We didn’t get around to coloring them in, but I kept hanging on to our handmade map. Sixteen years later, after John, Bethany, and Mary Evelyn had all married and had children of their own, I pulled out the map one time when we were all together. With smiling faces, they took turns coloring in Louisiana and Florida.
Since then, I have wanted to find a way to hang our map with something other than the two-inch tape I used in our homeschooling days. So how do you hang a 62-inch wide paper map without breaking the bank? I had to wait for someone to create magnetic poster hangers. My long-awaited dream came true this past Sunday night when I hung our United States of America map in our playroom. Ta da!
Kicking yourself about some unfinished homeschool project? Kick no more. You just might get to check that off your to do list someday in the far, far distant future!
There is an appointed time for everything.
And there is a time for every matter under heaven . . .
Ecclesiastes 3:1
Thank you for this story, and particularly the final encouragement telling us that it’s not too late to finish a project. 🙂 It is very hard to “do all of the things” while loving, training up, homeschooling, cooking, cleaning, transporting our children, etc.
I praise God for homeschooling and the opportunities that present themselves again (like your wall map of the US.) Love it!