Here is the little story of how a seed of an idea took root in our heads and led us to this ridiculous journey we are about to find ourselves on.
Once upon a time in a land that was colder than necessary a family of six took a trip to Toronto in the middle of April.
The father was about to start a stretch of work that would be relatively unreasonable and so before it began they all bundled up on a via rail train, with a couple of strollers and a large amount of backpacks and set off on a four-day “holiday”.
Through the four days, the wind was fierce, the downtown grocery store was overpriced and the two-year-old refused to stay in her bed at night, but the memories were rich.
Several months later, when the Father was going to go on a work trip that would span six weeks, a friend gave him some good advice. Book a trip of epic proportions, that way when you call home you will have something to discuss and dream about together and it will help keep you feeling like you are all on the same team.
So a promise was made. And the children were told that when their Father returned they would go to the promised land…Disney World.
This was the ultimate dream of the children. Over a year before when the eldest daughter had learned about Disney World for the first time, she had amended her night-time prayers. “Dear Lord, Thank you for making Disney World”.
This is the part of the story where “once upon a time” meets the real world because as much as it might shock you, this is a true story and the story is about us. And in the real world sometimes life expenses happen that are more than you hoped, and when you try to budget out your vacation it’s going to be more expensive than you had thought.
But this is where the memory of the Toronto trip came into play. Toronto was really hard, and given the opportunity, we would do it over and over again. So here is what we did, we searched and searched for the right deal that worked for our family. And then….this part is wild…Megan pre-made 14 days’ worth of dinner and froze them. In fact, she did such a good job planning for food that our food budget (groceries + restaurants) was less in January with a two-week vacation than our average month.
Check out our Instagram account for more pictures from our Disney trip
And the Disney trip (Plus a week in an AirBNB in the Florida Panhandle) was pretty hard. The weather was the coldest week of the entire year in Florida that year. (Our biggest expense was having to buy toques at Disney World.) The friend who came down with us to help out got sick. So much so they had to fly back to Canada instead of driving back with us.
But again, it was totally worth the memories. And even more so we discovered we LOVE the planning part of travelling. We love the problem solving. How to make it work with the budget we had.
If you’re wondering where we got the idea to travel indefinitely, and squish our family of now 7 into an RV, it did start in the land where dreams come true. Disney World the BEACH in FLORIDA
aterribleidea.ca 