The word stay-cation may have been coined in the early aughts and became hip along with “gas-tank getaways” during hard economic times in 2008, but for some of us growing up back in the 20th century, all family vacations fit that definition.
I grew up in Marshfield, a small town smack in the center of Wisconsin. Our family trips rarely ever even crossed state lines. We'd drive an hour or two to a slightly less small town and book connecting rooms at the Howard Johnson’s with another family from our neighborhood. Safety in numbers. My father taught middle-school social studies and my mother looked after me and my brother Bryan, four years my junior, until she went back into retail when I was 10. So while we never thought of ourselves as poor, exactly, money was carefully budgeted.
