Beachsteading and Slopesteading

Winter trips

Winter is time for dormant fields to rest, for gardeners to make big plans, and winter is also a great time for a special family vacation.

If you live somewhere not very warm or far from the ocean, we suggest a beach vacation.

If you live somewhere without snowy slopes, consider a mountain vacation.

Or a day trip!

Key considerations: you want to have fun, you want to have fun together, you want to have plenty of contact with nature, and you want to avoid your fun being directed and produced by people outside your family.

Homesteading and vacations

It can be hard to get away from a homestead.  Winter is usually an easier time.  You have fewer animals, no crops, if you have poultry they may not be laying . . . but regardless you should structure your homestead so that you can take time away.  Greg Judy, Comeback Farms, says he and his wife need at least two solid weeks away every year.

Adjusting what you do on your homestead so that you have downtime is important.

The best way to do this is to remember that a good homestead should really be an extended family or neighborhood project.  You need to cultivate friends and neighbors just as much as you cultivate your soil.  Having people who can step in to cover your operation for a time is really important.

Spontaneous Fun

If two weeks is not practical, do day trips or short trips, just a day or two.  They can be spontaneous  Let’s put in a plug for just throwing together a trip at the last minute.  A lot of people have the idea that you need a lot of advance planning to make for a good trip.  Not so.  True, the longer and more complicated the trip, the more its outside your experience, the more than can grow wrong without advance planning.   But the point of the trip is to have fun and doing something spontaneously makes everybody feel like they are having an adventure.  To put this in psychological terms, doing a spontaneous last minute trip tells the family that you are willing to take mild risks (mild risks are like roller coasters, they feel exciting) and also that you are care free (i.e., you have the resources and capabilities to deal with problems as they arise).  That mad scramble right at the beginning where everybody is scurrying to throw things together, half tense and half excited, the father barking orders but also making jokes, is peak family time.  Not only does it establish a great tone for the rest of the trip but the family experience of themselves as people who can work together quickly and effectively and cheerfully makes a big difference.

Because spontaneous trips start out with this cheerful carefree vibe before they have even begun, you can usually have a cheaper less elaborate experience and still have just as much fun.

All trips are going to have problems, spontaneous trips more so, but because everyone knows it’s a spontaneous trip the bumps and hiccups seem less of a problem. Instead, adapting on the fly feels like part of the fun.

Fun and Fun Together

Its good to be flexible, but you want to have plenty of leisure time, you want some activities that are family activities, and you want some measure of down time from work, school, social media, and so on. 

Touch Grass

There is an internet meme of “touch grass,” meaning get out in nature.  Not every familysteader is a homesteader, but most familysteaders in cities are going to be at least growing some herbs and flowers and hitting up the parks.  So “touching grass” shouldn’t be that unusual.

But even for steaders on a farm, we believe that the beach trip or the mountain trip are important ways to “touch grass.”  Getting into some aspect of nature that you are unfamiliar with reawakens your senses of the natural world.  It feels good.

Engaging with nature means less resort style and less managed experiences.

Its incumbent on you as the father or the mother to reinforce this.  Point out flowers, breezes, smells, sights, how happy everyone is.

Driving

Driving isn’t always practical, but when possible, drive.  Done right, there are lots of grounds for making the fun part of the trip start before you get there.  Singing together, telling stories, playing games are great.  But even just listening to music or to an audiobook or having someone read out loud is creating shared experience.  Pace this, of course, and adjust to your own personalities.

Golden memory

Art and literature primes us to think that nostalgia and golden memories are somehow fake.  Its true that drama and conflict make for more interesting stories.

But in real life, golden memories are one of the strongest possible cements for identity that we know.  To paraphrase scripture,  “when he is young, give a child golden memories of the way he should go, and when he is old he shall not depart from it.”

You cannot induce golden memories at will.  But what you can do is create fertile soil for them and they will spring up naturally.  Winter beach trips and slope trips are high yield for golden memories.

You can’t create golden memories but you can enhance them by referring back to them later.  “Remember when we . . .”

Funny stories are perfect for this.

Self-Directed Fun

There’s nothing wrong with doing managed adventures per se.  By all means, pay for the zip line or the whale tour or the bobsled run if that is within your means.

(Never go into debt for a vacation.)

However, self-directed fun works better for you than the kind that others provide.  You want your family to know that you don’t have to rely on outsiders to organize you and make you happy.  You want them to see happiness and organization as internal properties of the family, not something that has to be created from outside.

Beaches and slopes are great for this.  There’s plenty to do in the sand and the surf, and there’s plenty of snowmen and snowball fights and sledding.

Beach Trips

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash Not a tuna.

Get plenty of sand and surf and sun.  (Mineral sunscreens only).  Eat seafood.  Fishing is primary production, so booking some sport fishing can be a really good idea.  Grilling the swordfish or tuna you caught yourselves is amazing.  One family we know brought a pint jar of homemade lard with them on their trip.  They still rave about the tuna steaks.

Snow Trips

Stay warm and dry!  Hot drinks, fires, and extra clothes are all good.  Wool socks can get soaked and still be warm.  Tubes, sleds, snowshoes, something like that will enhance the experience.

Old-fashioned Flexible Flyers are as beautiful as they are exciting.  A kid who gets some encouragement to put some effort into maintaining it (oiling it down afterwards, etc.) can really fall in love with one.  It’s not just the Citizen Kane movie that says so.  Ask your friends if anybody had one when they were a kid, and watch eyes light up.

Being a Ski Family

We have known several families that get lots of mileage out of being the ski family.  This has downsides: cost, injuries, getting sucked into upper middle class status games, the fact that it’s usually a highly managed and outside-organizedresort-style experience  The upsides are also real, especially for families that live in the right area of the country and who don’t have a farm.  If you have slopes not too far away, and you have traded off rural living for income, becoming the ski family can be very positive for identity formation and for ‘touching grass.’

Homeschooling and being the ski family combine very well. Lots of uncrowded slopes on a Wednesday.

A Case Study

This is the email that prompted this post.

Today was a great one.  We talked a little about going down to the mountains yesterday but thought it probably wouldn’t work.  This morning we decided lets do it.  We had a family counsel for about 5 minutes, we listed everything out, and then just did it.  Kids checked the list for more when they finished what they were doing.  We were out the door in 45 minutes.   The kids had a competition to see who saw the first snow.

The lake where we can ice skate was closed (people should really update their websites grr).  There was this hardware store in the little town there so we bought storage bin lids and found a place to go sledding.  They worked great!  The storage bin not so much people were tumbling all over when we tried it, it got pretty wrecked.

 My kids got me pretty good with snowballs.   I had this epic throw from 30 yards away that burst in a huge cloud on top of my wife’s beanie.  We hurried down because the older girls had some commitments late in the afternoon and I still had time to split wood.  We spent more time driving.  That usually makes me mad.  This time I admit we had a great time, it worked out.