Hello, Friend.

I'm writing you this week from the comfort of a very modest room at a very swanky hotel. My husband had a conference here this weekend and invited me to tag along. It's only the second time in 34 years we've had a hotel room all to ourselves. No kids. Just the two of us.

Only -- at the moment -- it's just the one of me, all by my lonesome, since Doug's in a meeting downstairs and will be for most of the evening.

So instead of taking advantage of so rare an opportunity to devote my full attention to my beloved, I'm tapping away at my computer. And, since travel is on my mind, that's the theme of today's link list.

Free resources for you this week:

• ​Favorite Websites for Vacation Planning - great sites for minimizing cost and maximizing good memories
• ​A Prayer for Travelers - free printable prayer guide to use whenever you or your loved ones take a trip
• ​5 Reasons We Love Factory Tours - fun, fascinating, and often FREE, factory tours are the best
• ​Secret to Stress-Free Travel - planning and organizing tips to help make your next vacation more calm, relaxing, and stress-free
• ​Travel Bingo Card Collection - 5 different free printable versions of this classic road trip game
• ​Free Printable Road Trip Games - more games to keep kids entertained on long car rides
• ​Our Family Flew FREE to Europe - not once or twice, but three times... this post explains how we did it
• ​Travel Quote Coloring Page - "The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one."

What we're watching this week:

We're on a truncated school schedule for summer -- just doing basics plus a daily dose of current events à la World Watch News and Prager U. Our favorite episodes from this week were Killing Comedy (funny but sad) and What's Wrong with Wind and Solar (very informative!). Both are only 5-minutes long, so I hope you'll give them a watch.

What we're eating this week:

Homemade macarons, courtesy of my culinarily-minded kids (see the fruit of their labors in this Instagram post).

What we're reading this week:

Doug started a new read aloud: Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, sixth in Stuart Gibb's Fun Jungle Mystery series. We're thoroughly enjoying it, although our nightly story time has been hijacked by Vacation Bible School this week, for which our teens were serving as volunteers.

Progress on last week's goals:

I made decent headway on the gardening: ✅ weeded a couple more flowerbeds weeded. ✅ got all the ferns and hostas in the ground, and ✅ divided/transplanted my Mexican petunias.

Goals for next week:

• go garage saling with my mom (while Doug is busy with his conference tomorrow)
• write another TImberdoodle Review
• babysit grandkids for 5 days while their parents are out of town

Like this email? Buy my book. Amazon has it on sale for 20% off right now (but I'm not sure how long that will last).

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