Cheap Skate

Sherry and I visit many ‘destination places’. The next few days we will be here in the Disney area.  Saturday morning we ate out.  I had a veggie omelet and fruit, Sherry ordered a big breakfast of meat, eggs and pancakes.  She does this because she knows I will eat half her breakfast.

The bill and tip was $25. WHAT? We are used to eating at White’s Café (Belmont) or Pete’s Diner (Leesburg, FL) for $10.  But this is a destination place.

(Balloon characters are from the net, but the young lady's art was as good or better)
While watching the tourists eating and having a good time. My attention went to the ‘Balloon Lady’.  A pretty girl who goes to the tables after a meal and entertains the kids by making balloon characters. She was good. She made a fantastic Minnie Mouse, Spider man, a dog and some magic swords.  About $40 worth of entertainment plus the meal. The kids and parents seemed to be happy, after all this is a vacation.

I was beating my brain trying to remember if we ever took the boys on a week’s vacation at a motel and ate out the whole time— No, Sherry verified my thinking. Our vacations were always a combination of camping near a destination place and eating mostly from the cooking on the Coleman pump gas stove or roasting wieners over a campfire. But we did Cherokee, Myrtle, Key West, Lookout MT/Ruby Falls, Six Flags over Georgia and a couple more.

Once I did rent a boat at a lake and we had a ball.  It was an open fishing boat, but to us it was a ‘cabin cruiser’. I needed to use a ‘pathroom’, so I pulled up to a small isolated island. The boys and Sherry stayed in the boat, laughing up a storm.  I didn’t know why until after I sent the film off to ‘Jack Rabbit Film Processing’. Sherry had taken a picture of ‘daddy’s’ back, as he was peeing, to the boys delight.

I have threatened to get a picture of Sherry’s ‘backside’ when she potty’d behind the bush (quote Lisa, ‘I learned to potty behind a bush while fishing with grandma’). But I am ‘smart enough’ not to actually take the picture, :-O .

Truthfully, we refused to go in debt for Christmas or vacations.  So in the last few years by smart investments over our lives we travel parts of the world (still on a shoe string) but see the same beauty of nature that many wealthy folk do. All 50 states and over 20 countries.

Nite Shipslog

PS: The two exceptions but the same rule, no going in debt (for the two of us): A week in Hawaii and a cheap flight to Germany ($275 round trip pp) and road trip in a rented car around Europe (4 or 5 countries) eating in local café’s. DAT WAS FUN.

 Above was our first Trailer RV, I built that one, it was a pop up.

This VW was our first motor home. LOL