We are another day closer to having a tiny helpless human being in our house again. Umm, is there a timeout button somewhere that I can push? Shae has been nesting, er collecting some of the infant paraphernalia that we shed when Frugal Boy outgrew it. One of those items is a new, used neglect-o-matic. For all of you normal folks out there, I believe the politically correct term is ‘Excersaucer’.
Frugal Boy was all to happy to help set it up and test out all of the different dingle dangles.
I’m wondering when he will grow tired of it. He has been playing with it the entire time that I wrote this post. Did I mention that it makes a lot of noise? At least the price was right. FREE!
When I was growing up, we would make an annual or biennial road trip to visit my Grandma in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a full day or sometimes even two day car ride and it was BOOORRRIINNG. I don’t mean the car ride itself was boring, of course that was, but also the destination portion as well. To add insult to injury, the route to and fro always passed by Lake Delton, home to Wisconsin Dells and some of the largest waterparks in the world. I always remember looking out the window as we crept along the interstate and wished that we would stop there instead. It would have been a lot more fun than the regularly scheduled program.
A kid can dream
Alas, we never did stop at the waterparks on our way to Grandma’s. As an adult, I understand my parents reasoning. Firstly, it is expensive, especially when you have a station wagon full of kids. Secondly the purpose of the road trip was to visit home bound family members.
30 years later and kid me got his wish fulfilled! Shae’s work puts together discount trips throughout the year. We decided to take advantage of one such trip that was a two night stay at America’s largest indoor waterpark, the Wilderness Resort in Lake Delton, WI.
3 Charter Buses Caravanned
a small part of the mega resort
3 indoor waterparks for the price of 1
The room cost was $386.27 for both nights, and the bus ticket cost was $25 per person. We also spent $85 on dinners, and another $14 on breakfasts and lunches. The total trip cost was $560.27 including all transportation, lodging, food, tickets, taxes, fees, and gratuities. Per person, that comes out to $186.76 or $93.38 per day. We could have included a 4th person for just the bus fare of $25 plus food. One could easily argue that this was not a frugal trip.
We did save gas money by riding on the charter bus, so that was probably $40 saved. We also saved quite a bit of money by bringing breakfast and lunch staples from home and only eating out for dinner. Finally, the room rate was a special group rate. We saved $15 with the Group Rate for lodging.
There are three separate indoor waterparks at this mega resort, and we tried them all out over the course of two days. All of them had a mix of little kid/teen/adult attractions. Shae couldn’t partake in any of the slides because she is sporting a wonderfully cute baby bump.
Frugal Boy at a stout 37″ was able to go with me on probably 50% of the slides. The two of us had a great time riding tubes and rafts down dark passageways. At the end of the trip, he said it was his favorite part. Ahhhh.
Some areas were included in the lodging price, such as this three story play area.
It was a lot of fun climbing around the structures and using the air cannons to shoot nerf balls at other people.
Frugal Boy loading a mega cannon.
a little teamwork
multi-story slides are fun!
We skipped other areas that were pay-to-play, such as the Arcade and High Ropes course.
my nephew would be begging to go on this.
We had packed breakfasts and lunches from home to save money on eating. I was pleasantly surprised with the cost, quality, and service of the dinner choices. I was expecting concession stand quality food at huge markups in cost all paired with crappy service. Instead for dinner we had decent food with quick friendly service at only a modest ‘tourist trap’ markup in price.
Frugal Boy contemplating what he wants for dinner
When we travel, we try to stick to our normal bed times. For Frugal Boy that is 7pm, so like it or not, we tend to have a lot of downtime during the evening. One of the tech items that I really enjoy is Plex. Plex lets you serve up your media collection at home to anywhere in the world. Now when we travel, we can bring along an old laptop, or our Apple TV and we can watch all of the same movies and tv shows that we can watch at our home theater. When Mom and Dad just need a moment, Paw Patrol is still one of the best distractions.
It will be nice when the kids get a bit older and do activities later into the day. For now though, we’ll just enjoy the cuddles.
The company does the same, or very similar, bus trips each year. Next year, we’d probably skip this trip because there is not a lot that a one year old can do at the park.
While it was an expensive weekend getaway, it was a lot of fun and our last 3-person trip before our family dynamic changes. Shae and I both wanted to enjoy and savor the last bit of time that we have with Frugal Boy as an only child.
Over Christmas break we joined Shae’s family for a jaunt to Pennsylvania. I think it was part family reunion, part celebrating her sisters graduation from a masters degree program. Anyhoo, below are some pictures from the trip with a heavy emphasis on Frugal Boy.
Shae and I hosted Thanksgiving this year and my parents handed me an envelope filled with banking receipts covering years of my childhood. It could have just as easily been shredded, but since I have it, I might as well delve in and examine some of the financial going ons of my childhood. I have vague recollections of particular financial events, such as diligently depositing birthday and Christmas gift money, but now I have the receipts to piece it all together.
Then
It all started when I was 3 months old. My parents opened up my first bank account. Gee, thanks Mom and Dad. Back in the olden days, there was no online banking. So I had a Savings Register to record transactions in.
Opening up the register, you can see the first deposit, and subsequently, how old I am.
That $310.00 adjusted for inflation would be equivalent to $660 in 2016. Thanks Grandparents, uncles, aunts, and family friends for pitching in for my financial future.
Over the years, the balance steadily grew. I particularly like the 4th or 5th grade me that deposited $25 of ‘prize money’ in 1998.
I have no memory of what contest I won back then, but an interesting thing begins to happen around that time period. The handwriting changes, and some of the entries are being made by a little boy.
Around junior high school, middle school, or whatever you call 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, I had saved up enough money, at my parents behest, to start meeting the minimum requirements of Certificates of Deposits, or CDs for short. I do remember my Dad always shopping around the 4 or 5 banks in town looking for the best CD rates. I also remember him on a trip up to Grandma Schenk’s house once bemoaning the fact that she did not shop around rates and was leaving money on the table by being loyal to the same bank forever.
Anyway, in ’00, there is a receipt of a CD being closed.
At age 13, the saver mentality had been thoroughly beaten into my head by my parents and I had approximately $3,000 to my name, the bulk of which was tied up in a CD.
Birthday’s and Christmas’s kept rolling by year after year, and year after year I would write a fistful of thank you notes to grandparents, uncles, and aunts before dutifully marching down to the local bank and depositing checks and cash. At some point my Dad made me go alone and stopped helping me fill out the deposit slips. Of course I was terrified, but it was a good sink or swim lesson.
My Dad kept optimizing the best savings rates for me and kept the bulk of my savings locked up in CDs.
This particular CD was kept open for 2 years before being closed. The grand total of interest earned over that two years was $231.47.
In 2004, I began working and earning money for myself. The pay was negligible, but the real payoff was learning the value of a dollar. Performing a mind numbingly boring task for hours on end to collect a small paycheck gives one plenty of time to think. Suddenly, that new flashy item being marketed to you seems a little less interesting when you replace the dollar cost with an hour cost. Something that costs $50, is the same as something that costs almost 10 hours of work for someone on Indiana’s minimum wage of $5.15/hr. Yes, that was what I started at. Spending several hundred of my own dollars to take a girl to high school prom did not seem like a balanced equation. A couple of hours of fun was not worth the 50 hours of work required.
Finally in ’06 as a senior in high school, I opened up my first solo bank account. I was now 100% in charge or my own finances. The rest as they say is history.
Now
Now the tables have turned. I am in the role of Dad, and Frugal Boy and Frugal Fetus are in the role of child. Just like my parents handled all the finances when I was born and slowly relegated duties to me over the years, Shae and I are doing the same with our children. Frugal Fetus doesn’t know it, but he/she already has a college savings plan opened up and partially funded. In fact, since it was opened in July, it has returned 6.83% APY. Frugal Boy’s 529 college savings plan has returned 8.95% APY for the year-to-date. On a more concrete level, any cash that Frugal Boy receives he diligently stores in his doggy bank at his parents behest. Any checks are invested into his college savings. Amusingly enough, Frugal Boy already recognizes and calls out the different bank branches as we travel through town. I think he is almost ready to graduate to his first real bank account. We will probably open a PNC ‘S’ is for Savings account for him. It has 0 fees for age 18 and under account holders and uses Sesame Street characters to encourage kids to save.
There are a number of savings programs available for kids. Here is a roundup of some of the more popular ones.
I wanted to do something a little more memorable than Chinese takeout for Shae’s birthday, so for this long weekend, I packed up the car and we did a little road trip to two of my favorite childhood state parks in Indiana, Turkey Run and Shades. The two state parks are situated in West Central Indiana near the Illinois border. They both operate in the Eastern timezone.
Given that it was a holiday weekend, the park campgrounds were full, but I was able to make a reservation a week ahead of time for a primitive campsite at Rockville Lake Park. RLP is a private campground just 15 minutes south of Turkey Run and about 5 minutes east of the town of Rockville.
We arrived a bit before dinner on Friday night and decided to set up camp before looking for food. Who really wants to be a camp cook after a day of work and driving multiple hours.
I made Frugal Boy help pack the car, so he was excited to see those packed items come out and be used.
It didn’t take long for him to become a camping expert and start doling out advice on how best to secure the tent.
With camp secured, we drove into town and ate at a mom and pop restaurant. I had forgotten to stop at an ATM and only had $28 in cash in my wallet. Shae never carries cash and relies on the A(ndrew)TM whenever she needs it. I was a bit worried when we sat down at the cash only restaurant, but then remembered how cheap food is in rural Indiana. At $7 or $8 for an entree with two sides, we weren’t exactly pressured to eat miserly. Now I know how my middle brother, who spent a decade on the east coast, feels whenever I am bitching about the cost of staples.
The campground did not have an easily accessible supply of potable water so we stopped at a grocery store and bought a few jugs of water along with an evening treat.
A 4 pack of Smores drumstick ice cream cones was cheaper than buying a bundle of wood and having a campfire. You’re not supposed to transport fire wood because of all the critters that can hitch a ride and invade a new ecosystem and you are also not supposed to collect down branches and twigs in the campground because it depletes nutrients from the forest (my ecologist sister can correct me in the comments).
We turned in early that night because we were dog gone tired.
I woke up in the morning to an empty tent. Sometime in the night we acquired a couple of new neighbors. My stomach was growling, so I set to work making breakfast.
We had packed a cooler with half a dozen eggs, cheese, and an assortment of snack food. For car camping, I love the incredibly simple and rock solid single burner propane stove that I bought a decade ago at Wally World.
You have to buy the propane tanks separately, but they seem to last forever. The stove is strong enough to boil a few cups of water, so you can make quite a variety of foods on it. I had to take a picture of this particular propane tank because my parents gave it to us when they cleaned out an outbuilding. I remember these old tanks from my childhood, but they still work!
Shae had taken Frugal Boy down to the lake to go play.
When they came back, breakfast was ready!
I knew that Turkey Run was going to be popular on a Saturday, so we made tracks and got their early. The suspension bridge over Sugar Creek is always a favorite spot. A few kayakers and canoes drifted by below us while we crossed.
Inside, the spirit of adventure tugged at us to move forward.
Frugal Boy found a hiking stick
that he promptly lost, but talked about the rest of the day.
We found a cave (more like an overhang).
We hiked through streams
and climbed up ladders.
By lunch time, we had covered about 5 miles of trails, Frugal Boy was carried for some of that, but we made him walk even when he didn’t want to.
At lunch a bee landed on my hand. Frugal Boy asked what it was and I explained that it was a bee and it could hurt me. If I stayed still it would leave me alone and leave. We watched as it flew off and around and landed on Frugal Boy’s hand. My lesson apparently went in one ear and out the other because he tried to squish it. Maybe he is a first hand experience learner.
After lunch, we did one last trail. It was nearly empty and tucked away behind some cabins, but I thought it was one of the best trails we did that day.
When we left around 2pm all of the parking lots were full and the line of cars waiting to get into the park stretched out onto the highway. Just like the Shedd Aquarium, it pays to be there early.
We took a nap back at camp, and walked around the grounds. It was interesting people watching. Most of them were glampers, or people that were glamping (glamorous camping). We saw many satellite dishes, ginormous RVs, and flat screen tvs.
I made dinner on my trusty single burner camp stove.
I’m still trying to figure out what chain of events happened that made me the de facto camp chef. Some where history went wrong.
Frugal Boy has been doing very well with using the potty, but he still has some things to learn, like how to pee standing up. He got a primer on this camping trip and his only words were Awesome! and Again!
In the morning, we broke down camp quickly and left RLP so we could get to the canoe outfitters in time for their first run of the day. The outfitters was a well oiled machine that was processing hundreds of people. For $22 we had a three hour canoe ride down Sugar Creek. I could only surmise that the only way the outfitter made money was by sheer volume.
We got a different view of the suspension bridge that we crossed the day before.
We took one grainy selfie before we reached the pullout spot, a red covered bridge.
There is something like 48 covered bridges in this part of Indiana. I have never done it, but there is a covered bridge festival if that is something that interests you.
Back at the outfitters, we took one last picture of Frugal Boy and the canoe. He was really excited and wanted to go again.
From there we drove up to Shades State Park. The difference was night and day. Shades didn’t charge an entrance fee, even though it was listed. The parking lot was half empty at noon, compared to overflowing. The trails were sparsely populated. We ate lunch and hiked two more trails before declaring ourselves completely tuckered out. Frugal Boy loved the tricky ravine hiking and slept the entire car ride home.
If you are looking for a fun place to hike in Western Indiana, then I would recommend Shades or Turkey Run. There are some fun trails.
