#SingleMomChronicles: Travel Edition

As a single mother, I have a plethora of responsibilities. Since I am the "active" parent, that makes me the Sole caregiver to my children. I have two beautiful daughters. Anything that a married couple would take care of together ( mortgage/rent, utilities, food, ect), I have to do alone. Please don't think I am complaining. I do the thing, ok? So, I ended up losing my job a few months back. My oldest daughters dad (yes, I have two baby daddies) is court ordered to pay child support. I am supposed to get $85 a week, $330 a month. Well, in November of last year, he stopped paying. I guess I can say he didn't stop on purpose. The payments stopped because his unemployment ran out. He doesn't work because he and his wife (yup, baby daddy number 1 is married now) have a special needs infant, so he stays home with her (supposedly) during the day while his wife works. Now, let me clarify: I did not say "supposedly" because I am hating or jealous...trust me. I said it because our parents live on the same street. I can stand on my parents porch and see his parents porch. Because of this, I can see when he drops his daughter off at his moms house many days. Presumably so he can run the streets. I honestly don't know and quite frankly, it is none of my business.

Any who, being a single parent can (and often does) mean that there isn't always money left over after the bills are paid. As a result, recreational outings are few and far between. I tax my tax return check and book four days and 3 nights at a hotel on a beach somewhere every year, just so my kids can have some sort of vacation, you know? While children were grateful for a vacation, what about the rest of the summer?

The prices of EVERYTHING have gone up. I noticed that the sizes of things are decreasing as well. Well played manufacturers, well played. It is a single mom nightmare to say the least. We live in Maryland. Ocean City is about 3 hours away from us. One day I just had an idea: how about we drive down to Ocean City. We can stay down there just for the day and come back home. I can't always afford a hotel/motel stay, so a day trip would theoretically only cost a tank of gas. The girls and I got all our stuff: blankets, towels, big umbrella, sand toys, food and drinks in the cooler. We got up at 6 am sharp. We pulled up the boardwalk by 9 am. The beach is free. If you get early like we always do, the parking is great. The times I did have a few extra bucks, we would do an activity. Once we got into a groove (routine for my younger readers lol), we started planning ahead so we could put money away specifically for the beach. We came up with a list the things we wanted to do on the boardwalk. We checked off each thing as we completed it. We did everything on our list and a few extras. We finished last summer. This year is Rehoboth beach in Delaware. It's just up the road from Ocean City.Many people don't realize that the shore is the same. The beach name changes depended on the area:

Ocean City - Maryland

Rehoboth - Delaware

Virginia Beach - Virginia

Here is our little to-do list for Ocean City:

*Arcade I

*Arcade II

*Ripley's Believe it or not Museum

*Mirror fun house

*Boardwalk Carnival (ride every ride)

*Rent/Ride multi-person bicycle

*Play every boardwalk carnival game and win something

**TIP** Hotels/motels are much cheaper Sunday through Thursday. We randomly decided to stay overnight one time. The motel room was $57 for that Thursday night. I asked how much to stay on Friday. The price more than doubled to $135. We didn't stay a second night.

I hope this helps and/or inspires someone! Until next time mamas!

*MUAH*