Category: friends

I love this photo. Nothing says midwest like a goat dozing in the sun.

I realize I probably haven’t properly described the Field Trip concept in detail, so it’s probably just confusing to some.

We live in a college town, so when summer rolls around, things get very quiet. Many folks head off to beach houses for months at a time or teach summer sessions overseas, families in tow.

However, our company runs year-round, which means we spend all but one week of summer in town. We hope to change that up some day, and spend weeks on end on summer adventures with our kids. But for now, we spend the summer as homebodies.

That first summer I got a bit bored in our quiet town, so I started planning field trips for myself. Once a week we would get out of dodge and go somewhere. Somewhere different and outside our normal routine, just to shake things up a bit. I begged people to go with me. Every now and then someone would come along.

Fast forward five years, and I’m releasing the list of field trips a month in advance, and all the slots for our nine field trips filled up within two hours.

Wow.

We love these weekly outings, and love even more that so many people join us.

I’d encourage anyone to take on summer field tripping. Even just one or two each summer. Round up some friends, because there are many things available to groups that aren’t available to individuals.

In a future post I’ll detail all the places we’ve been in the last five years. But in the meantime, I will pass along this one nugget—the one thing I’ve learned in all those years is how often, if you just ask nicely, people usually say, yes, they would love to have you come visit. And because we asked, good golly, have we had some rich experiences.