Tips for Planning a Staycation

My husband is in his last year of dental school and life is pretty crazy at our house. Besides the financial burden of school, his schedule makes it really hard to plan any sort of vacation. We decided to stay local this year and have our own staycation. We planned for a few days around a holiday (to save days off) and spent our days discovering more  to love about this desert we call home!

I was provided compensation in exchange for this post. Regardless, all opinions are entirely my own.

Planning a staycation is fun and easy but here are a few big decisions I made ahead of time, many of them with the help of my GWIG app.

Who? Are you keeping this staycation to just your family or do you want to invite friends or family to join the fun?

What? What are you going to do with your time? Visit museums? See movies? Go on a hike? Eat delicious food? Find the hidden gems around you, take some time to explore!

Where? Decide where you want to stay. Are you going to stay home or go to a hotel or resort. This will actually set the tone for your whole vacation so chose what works best for you and your family!

As for us, we chose to stay at our house. Mostly because it saved us a little more money, but also because our kids are still little and keeping some familiarity is important! This gave us a little more leeway for our activities.

We used my GWIG app, which stands for “Go Where I Go”, to find some new places to have some fun! First on our list was a tasty treat for breakfast. I typed doughnuts into the app and it came up with a list of places for sweet treats. We had visited a few but some new names popped up so we tried K-May Doughnuts and Bagels. We were not disappointed! We used GWIG all week long to find new food and entertainment locations, including a park great for feeding ducks and new spots at one of our favorite lakes.

The way GWIG works is all word-of-mouth referrals. It works like a digital rolodex that you can share. When you are in a new vacation spot or town you can log in and search for favorited locations near by of other friends who use GWIG. No need to weed through a ton of weird reviews and ratings from an internet search. You can refer anything to friends asking from your favorite burger joint to the best dentist you have ever had.

GWIG also benefits business owners! By Subscribing to GWIG they can see who is referring their business and who is responding to these referrals. Overtime they can use this information to interact more with their greatest advertising tool, you! Word-of-mouth has always been the most reliable form of referral. No one tells their friends about a pediatrician who is just so so. This makes all GWIG referrals 5 stars! The best part, it is free! You can download it here for your iPhone and here for your Android.