Recession Survival Tips: Vacationing on Your Home Turf

Most of the people appearing in news reports to talk about the economic hard times are doing well. First of all, they're employed in either some kind of media, financial, academic, or government job. It's perfectly normal for them to speak of "green shoots" or "signs of recovery."

After all, the economy depends largely on consumer spending, and consumer spending depends on people feeling confident enough to spend money. People don't have much confidence now, that's for sure. You can tell the economy is at a low point if you count the number of attorney hire ads on television looking for people who want to file lawsuits against anyone for any reason at all.

Let me tell you right off that we're doing okay. Not great, but okay. The reason we're doing okay is not because we have lots of confidence in the future of the economy-it's because we've had poverty training.

That's right. Born into poverty that some would describe as "crushing," I know how to adjust to horrible economic conditions. Most of the cost-cutting measures we employ as part of our financial strategy are little things like bypassing a favored restaurant and making our way home.

The largest cost savings area which we have incorporated into our money-saving strategies is to cut back on vacationing. Amend that to say that we are taking local "vacations." It always amazes me how much stuff there is to do in your own backyard. Stuff you always thought was too cornball to do.

A good place to start is to visit your local historical society, often attached to your local library. Every place in America has a history of development and most are intensely interesting. The famous "Walking Purchase" took place south, west, and north of here. Not too far away, the Indians killed the family of one of the men who walked off the famous theft of Native American property. Investigating that one thing could take a lifetime and result in a significant number of inexpensive "field trips."

If the local historical society is not your favorite starting point, you can just snap on your Magellan, Tom-tom, or Garmin GPS and punch the "points of interest button." I'm amazed at some of the interesting and often free entertainment I've found as I'm driving around. Wineries, museums, parks, zoos, and a variety of entertainments can be located with the touch of a button.

Our Garmin GPS unit helped us find the nearby Martin Guitar factory and museum, the Crayola Factory and Museum, the Canal Museum, the Harley-Davidson museum, the Henry Rifle Museum, the Mack Truck museum, the Museum of Cement, and an endless list of others.

The surprising thing about visiting sites you wouldn't go to if you had the option of a trip to San Moritz is that you learn things you'd never expect. I though the Cement Museum would set world records in boredom but you come away with a whole new appreciation of the structures which hold back the water, support the highways and the bridges and were even used to make boats. The stuff can withstand thousands of pounds of pressure and even be poured underwater. How do they do that?

The nice thing about saving five or ten thousand dollars on a vacation and just wandering around your home turf is that you come into direct contact with the world which, when you were flush with cash, you mostly tried to avoid. It's the lousy economy which helped me discover the Bethlehem home and burial plot of the poet, Hilda Doolittle. I was even more impressed when I Googled Hilda Doolittle's poetry.

Also in pursuit of cheap vacationing, I encountered the 1741 "Gemeinhaus" associated with the famous Moravian Count Zinzendorf! You know of Count Zinzendorf, don't you? The wealthy Dresden born missionary and religious enthusiast who established religious communities in far-flung parts of the world and was particularly interested in bringing the Word to the "savages" of the Eastern Wilderness?

You can't travel around Pennsylvania or into nearby New Jersey, New York, and Delaware, without coming into contact with the original inhabitants, variously called Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians. There were other native peoples, too, the Shaowanose (Shawnee) and the various Iroquois representatives who held imperium for a time over the less powerful and less organized "tribes" of the Minisink.

There's so much you can do for the price hardly more than a tank of gasoline or diesel. There's probably a museum near your town which is very much like the Allentown Art Museum-small but powerful. I'd been to large museums like New York's Metropolitan, and to ones in Amsterdam, and others in Paris, but in Allentown, PA., I saw such a fine collection of early Renaissance paintings as I could imagine.

The cost of admission was only $6 bucks-an added attraction in these mean, hard times. I've even hatched a cheaper plan as I surveyed their literature: "Sunday Admission: Free." Free! Oh, there are "green shoots," after all.