Welcome to the Tweed Trends podcast. Hey, Evette, what's trending today? Hey, I'm Evette, hey girl. And you are tuned in to Tweed Trends.
It's the quickest way to find out what's trending today. Hey, let's keep this vacation conversation going. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome back to Tweed Trends.
In the last episode, we talked about vacationing, where it came from, and who was the guy that had the right idea to do it in the first place. But then, there were some issues that came out of it, where you had the rich people that just could not take the roughing it type lifestyle. So then, these creative, innovative people, these entrepreneurs, save the day for them, because they created hotels and resorts and things like that. So, the rich could actually still get away, kind of get to where they were talking about going, but still be able to maintain their style of living, even if it is away from home.
The other issues that came up dealt with schools, where it just became really chaotic because people stopped sending their kids to school. So then the legislators were like, well, why not? Let's just go ahead and give the kids a break. Let's let them just stay home for the summer, run frolic and meadows and do what they do, and if their parents want to take them on vacation, they can do that too.
So today, I want to talk about kids and the two types of vacationing, whether it's a stay-at-home type vacation, or if it's a getaway type vacation. So for the people who couldn't afford to go, let's start with them. In the late 19th century, all of these accommodations are being made for people to keep their kids out of school, so if they wanted to go on vacation, they could. However, the idea of going on a trip, we had railroad systems that were up and running, but going on a trip still meant that you were gonna have to take some type of extended leave of absence from your job, and the average American just could not afford to do that.
So then time goes on and you've got Henry Ford, and they're making cars more available, more affordable, and that slowly changes what the country is looking like because more people are owning cars, then we continue and then you get the interstate system. So now there are more cars on the road going between city to city and being able to go to these different destinations, these vacation spots. So then it's like, okay, it's becoming a little bit more affordable for people to do things, and then the big kicker was after World War II, thanks to the GI Bill, then more Americans became college graduates. They got better paying jobs at bigger companies, and these companies were offering benefits.
You got things like healthcare, and you also got two weeks paid vacation, and that right there is what set it off for a lot of families, they were able to do that. Now, of course, we know we're not speaking about all families because things still weren't all that equal and equitable back then, but we're just talking about just the general American population type thing, we're not gonna go down that rabbit hole, not today. But so you had your rising middle class wealth, the unprecedented car ownership, and then the paid vacation, like I said, the summer vacation for the schools as well, made it like a free for all. Everybody's chomping at the bid, even though it was still only a small percentage of Americans that were doing it, especially on a year to year basis, it was still something that was picking up momentum.
So then you think about it, whether they wanted to go to someplace and be in nature, they wanted to go to a historical site, if they wanted to just go hang out with family in another city that was available for families to do. So now let's fast forward to today. Today is a little interesting because nowadays, in this year, a lot of people are trying to go on vacation, and the reason being is because we had to sit still so long during COVID. And so now people are just like, oh my gosh, we gotta get out, we gotta take advantage of every opportunity we have, because we hate for that thing to come back around, or something similar to it.
So you have all of these families that are going on vacations. However, there are still barriers when it comes to this whole summer vacation thing, because even if your job gives you two weeks vacation, kids get 12 weeks off for summer vacation. Well, what does that mean? You can go on vacation with your kids.
Let's say you take the whole two weeks. You still have 10 weeks that you gotta figure out what to do with your kids. If you're not a school teacher and you're out like your kids are, then here's where it gets a little tricky, summer camp. That's where a lot of the parents send their kids, especially the younger ones.
As they get older, I think people just kind of leave the kids at home and leave them to their own devices, literally pun intended, because of all of the video games and whatnot, kids are on their computers, on their phones, on these games, all the time. But for the younger kids that really shouldn't be staying at home by themselves, they're having to go to summer camp. Let me tell you about summer camp. It's expensive.
If you don't have a kid in summer camp, if you haven't done camp in a minute, let me tell you. Talking to my mom, it's funny as thing. Her idea of summer camp is a camp that you take them to and they stay there the entire summer. First of all, she never sent me to one of those camps.
So how she even knows about a camp like that? I don't know, I've got questions for her on that. But nowadays, camp lasts a week, two at the most. You can pay weekly for camps.
Now, granted, there may be some stayaway camps that do last longer, but you are going to pay a pretty penny for them or they are being sponsored by some bigger companies, big entities, that's fitting the bill for you, but don't get it twisted. It's costing a lot to house them there. The camps that are local, that you drop them off every morning before you go to work, those things run at least $200 for a week. And most of them do not provide meals, so you still have to pack a lunch for them.
You got to get them there, you got to get them back. It's bonkers, seriously. So when you think about, rather, it's the entire 12 weeks for a camp, which would run up here in roughly about $2,400, or if you, you know, being generous, say, only 10 weeks, still that's $2,000 of extra funds that you have to find from somewhere. So in some cases, parents are like, I might as well stay home, keep working, because I'm going to need that money, that extra money, when I can be working overtime or whatever, to be able to pay for my child to be cared for while I'm at work, and I know that they're safe.
Now, the other part I want to talk about are the kids that are going on the vacations. I think it's great when we can expose our children to different places, different cultures, different foods, those sort of things, but let's go to the actual travel portion of the trip. Let's say you're in the car, you're going someplace by car. What are your kids doing?
Nowadays, they're probably on their devices, but back in the day, we used to have fun pads, and I don't even know what you call those little plastic pads, where you lift up the film, and you write with the little red plastic pen on it, and when you're done, you lift it up and you just keep going back and forth with that. That was really good for playing tic-tac-toe, just saying. You play I Spy, you play like rhyming games, you do the license plate games, where you see where the people are from, all of these things where you got to talk with your family, and then eventually at some point, everybody's knocked out except the driver. That type of thing, I think we need to bring back.
If you're not doing those types of things with your kids in the car, I think you're doing them a disservice, because then as they have their kids and technology gets better and better and better, it's still that whole strangers in the night thing, two ships passing, you're all in one place, but nobody's communicating with each other. We need to bring that back, because even when you get to the destination, don't act like your kids aren't still trying to be on their device, because I've seen it. I've been to Filmery Unions, where there's a kid sitting off to the side, not interacting with anybody, and for the most part, people will leave them alone. It's like, you know what?
He's having fun over there. I'm going to let it go. But, no, that's unsat. Get your kids involved, get them talking to people, talk to them, get them asking questions and being inquisitive.
Don't let them veg out by themselves in a corner and have their eyes on that device the entire time. That's not good, that's not the business, that's not what you want to do, because you have to think about it in a future type view. If you allow them to do this, then when they have their kids, they're going to know what they did. And so that widening divide there just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And I get it, parents, I get it. That whole, are we there yet thing, is no fun at all, none. But when you think about places on the interstate, like 95, when you're headed towards North Carolina, and you're seeing all of these signs for South of the Border, I love that South of the Border does that, because it gives the kids something to look forward to and to count down the miles and get excited about, even though once you get to South of the Border, it didn't really anything there, it's not like on a amusement park. Now if they did that, then that might be a real situation, because then parents are gonna have to stop there and at least get on a ride or two before they continue on on their trip.
Right now, that's just a restroom stop. But I'm just saying, as far as the travel portion, if it's in a car, get them involved, talk to them. Now if you're going on a plane, that might be a little bit different, because you don't necessarily want to disturb other people around you by playing loud games and laughing a whole lot and all that sort of thing. And then if you have a larger family, you may not even be sitting all together.
It might be a parent with a little kid here and another parent with another little kid there. You might be able to get three of y'all on a row. If it's a bigger flight, you just might all be able to sit together. You never can tell.
But longer flights, of course, you tend to have movies that you can watch, but they do have games on their little system as well, that you can play with other passengers on the plane, like in another seat. So if you do have a parent that's sitting someplace else, you can still kind of play with them, but it's still on a device, so I'm kind of still like not all that excited about it. If we can go back to coloring books and reading books, hey, that's the thing right there, reading a book, then I think that the whole travel experience would be a little bit better. You can do kind of like a reading club with your kids where you have the book and your kids have the book, you can get them from the library, you don't have to go out and buy these books, and you read them together and then you can discuss what you read or read it aloud in the car, let the kids read aloud to you or not on the plane though, yeah, on the plane you'd have to have your own books, but in the car, sure, read along all day.
The bus, I've never written on a bus before, so I don't have any tips for the bus. The train is kind of like the airplane with way more legroom, I'm loving the train, and you meet some pretty interesting people on the train too, but still you're in that public type setting, so you kind of don't want to get too buck-wile on the train because you want to respect the other people around you, but those are just some suggestions and ideas, my own personal two cents. Two cents. Thanks for joining me for today's episode, and yes, there will be one more installment of our vacation talk, because I want to talk about what this guy did back in the 40s and 50s that was set up to help parents out, because you know they say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that's exactly what this person did, and yeah, it was a pretty big deal, it still is a pretty big deal, so I want to talk about that, but I'm just kind of teasing you here, I'm not going to say what it is, what I'm talking about, you got to come back for the next episode, so you know what if I mean Twitter and Instagram at hevept, that's at heveyt, or just look for the hashtag, tweet trends, see you next time.