We are on something closer to a year round schedule. The kids get 6 weeks for summer, a week in early November, 3 weeks at Christmas, the week of Ash Wednesday, a week and a half at Easter and two weeks around Pentacost.
Travel is a huge priority for us and where we spend the majority of our money at the expense of fancier clothes, bigger house, having a second car and whatnot, so I check airfare/trainfare/cruise rates, etc for their school breaks literally almost daily looking for deals and we go places whenever I can get something reasonable.
This year we were home for the Ash Wednesday break. We swam one day, saw the carnival parade one day and rented some movies.
At Easter we took half of the time and did a 4 day trip to Salzburg getting there by train (such a great option here).
For Pentacost we drove to Barcelona (11 hours) stopping at a campground in France for 2 days along the way. After 2 days in Barcelona we took a Disney Med cruise (fantastic).
Summer started last week. Our local mini gold sells 10 round punch cards that work out to 1.20 Euro (about $1.50) per round. SO we can hit that once or twice a week for fun in addition to whatever else i come up with. They went to Vacation Bible School every morning with friends (DD13 as a volunteer and DS11 as a participant). This week we have lots of appointments (orthodontist, speech therapy, optometrist, girl scout meeting, etc) and are filling in looking for new and interesting parks and playgrounds to visit. Next week we will be pretty low key. We will take one day to go swimming and one to see a movie (we were given a gift card) and do lots of biking and roller blading. That gets us though half the summer. The kids and I will camp for week 4 and our family is spending the last two weeks in London.
In November we will again take the trains and head north visiting the shipyard where the where the Disney Dream is being built and also Amsterdam.
At Christmas we got a good deal on airfare home (after literally checking daily for 8 months) so we will be flying to Colorado.
Obviously the "wow" factor is big due to living in Europe and we have trains as an option, but even in the US we pretty much traveled a huge amount of their vacation weeks. There is always at least an interesting campground within an hour's drive, and even lesser known places can be great to visit (and often very cheap). The biggest thing is if you want to travel you have to be flexible abotu location and diligent about looking for deals.
but it was a beautiful place to visit. So if anything, we will see Newport again before we see Cape May. We were in Newport this past April for our daughters college lacrosse game and it was perfect weather, not too crowded. Might head back there next spring.
