Stupidrestless

You should have hoarded your power boats and then assembled them into a voltron power boat and taken off when you got to water each night.

I used to take a lot of cheap vacations with my family of five. It's about managing expectations and taking advantage of what is around you.

Five days in Disney land would have cost the family $250 a day. Cost of getting there would have been significant. Instead we would spend the morning at a large dinosaur park, eat lunch after leaving at mcdonalds, travel a few hundred miles to an unimproved BLM camp site on a lake. Good food cooked over a camp fire. Time looking at constellations with the kids through google skymap. Wake up early and catch a few fish for breakfast. Or just fry eggs if that wasn't happening. Break camp and drive another hundred miles and spend the day hiking some lava beds. End the day at the kids grandparents house and spend the next day and night visiting them, spend a day digging fossils or gemstones at a quarry for ~20 dollars. etc.

That was all within a few hundred miles. I had two kids that were obsessed with dinosaurs and fossils. We made it a point to never camp more than two continuous nights, so everyone got a shower every other day at minimum.

Find something your family enjoys, get away from theme parks and prepackaged experiences and visit things. Make your own activities where you can. We would do an entire weeks vacation for ~700 dollars. We always took a day on each end to get ready and to unpack at the end. Going straight from a weeks vacation back to your working life is hard.

As someone who works in the lumber industry it's great to hear some discussion about how renewable wood resources are. Thanks.

Does your brother run the North Umpqua at all? If so I may have flipped him off.

I fly fish. Never had an incident until a group of guides stopped in the hole I was fishing looked me in the eye and slapped the water with her paddle as hard as she could.

Hope the poor family they were guiding got a discount on their go pro footage.