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My name is Joshua, I am your host. And today I wanna talk with you briefly about taking a vacation. And I'm gonna share an article with you that I recently read that I really enjoyed. But the impetus for this particular show comes from a conversation I overheard in a restaurant last night.

I was sitting in a restaurant having a little bit of food and I was by myself. And while I was there, I was listening to the couple or to two people at the table next to me talk. And there were two ladies and one of the ladies was a single mom.

And she was sharing with her friend about what she's doing this summer. And right now she's working four jobs. She's a single mom. Her daughter is with her daughter's grandmother right now for the summer. And the mom is using this time where she doesn't have to engage in childcare to basically work four jobs and save as much money as she can.

And she's working hard to save money. And her goal for that money is to take her daughter on a vacation. Now, I of course applaud that, but my heart went out to this mother because she's stuck in the American rut of spending crazy amounts of money on vacation because of not being able to think creatively about how to do it.

US Americans, as a general rule and a very strongly applicable stereotype, vacation very differently than much of the rest of the world. Now, you can vacation however you want, but I don't personally fit in very well to the US American stereotype. I first learned this number of years ago.

I was in college and I was working in, I was living and studying in Costa Rica. And I was working with a company that did ecotourism in Costa Rica. Ecotourism in Costa Rica is a strong deal. We prepared for one of our business school projects. We prepared an analysis of ecotourists and we focused on three countries, United States of America, Great Britain, and Germany, German, German people.

And the amazing thing between it, the amazing reality that we found was that there were strong and clear differences between these three particular cultures. Now, I don't remember the exact numbers of how much they would spend, but I'll tell you, I'll give you a broad brush that I think is pretty close.

US Americans will go on vacation in that time. They'll go on vacation for one week. They'll spend $10,000 on a one week vacation and they'll schedule every single hour of their day with something to do, especially something to do that costs money. The Brits will go on vacation for a month.

They'll spend $6,000 and they'll have a much more relaxed time. And the Germans would go on vacation for two months and spend $5,000 and have a much more relaxed time. And it's just interesting because in my own experience, I could think back and see exactly that happening again and again, where you see that US Americans spend so much money in such a short amount of time and they almost don't know how to do it otherwise.

And so in conversations I've had with people similar to this mother that I was listening to last night, their concept of vacation only involves spending money. And it frequently involves spending money at things that are designed to spend money. Whether it's go to Disney World or go in the hotel system, et cetera.

And there are other ways. Now, maybe sometime I'll give you my ideas on other ways, but I recently read this article in a Mother and Earth News compendium of articles back from the early, mid 1980s. And this book was super interesting to me. And I really enjoyed this particular story called "Trading Your Way Through a Vacation." I'm gonna share it with you because it shows how one family took a different approach to their vacation.

Now you might hear this story and you might think, oh, I can't even imagine, that is not for me. You're entitled to hear that and to think that. You can live as you want to live, but take this and use it as a creative fodder that will, and design for yourself an appropriate solution for an appropriate vacation methodology that will really help you in the future.

And enjoy this particular story. I thought it was quite fun. "Trading Your Way Through a Vacation." We all need a respite now and then, but taking a vacation most often means scrimping and saving to meet the expenses of being away from home. However, by negotiating trades and turning a vacation into an adventure, it's entirely possible to make that break from routine, not only pay for itself, but be profitable and fun as well.

One Canadian couple who liked to get away from the city to the Okanagan and Silmalkin Valleys of British Columbia for the summer, managed to exchange enough labor and produce to support themselves and their children for an entire three months away from home. The couple had previously made friends with an organic farmer and had arranged to help him with his work in return for a reduced price on produce when harvest time came.

They'd also agreed to bring him some seaweed for fertilizer when they came from their home on the coast, where it was freely available to anyone willing to take the time to gather it. Foraging for seaweed was one of their favorite occupations anyway, so the couple didn't mind at all.

They proceeded to harvest a two-ton truckload of storm-shredded kelp, eelgrass, rockweed, and dozens of other varieties of giant algae, all of it seasoned, so to speak, with sand, shell particles, and fine wood debris. After collecting this vegetation, they spread it out to be washed by the rain. Fresh seaweed is too salty for use as fertilizer, and dried by the sun.

Tending and tending it like hay, they eventually had a third of a truckload of choice, dry, nutrient-rich fertilizer to take to their farming friend. When the couple, their six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, arrived at the farm in mid-July, they found their friend way behind in his hoeing. The grass, pigweed, and nightshade were choking his soybeans, squash, corn, and tomatoes so badly that he couldn't keep up with it by himself.

He immediately offered them a credit of $4 per hour to hoe his fields for him. This was all the excuse they needed to pick up their tools and get to work. After gently prodding their friend with, "How long have we been hoeing so far?" and "What do you think the kids' work is worth?" the couple came right out and asked whether they could swap the whole family's efforts for produce.

Further discussion, further bargaining, resulted in a deal that was satisfactory all the way around. The family would hoe a certain part of their friend's fields in early summer and be paid in September with 20, 40-pound boxes of tomatoes. Then came the question of the seaweed. "What do you figure all that fertilizer's worth?" the farmer asked.

"Well, Hank," said the husband, "we've put so much love and labor into the weed that it's beyond price, so we'll just have to give it to you." The farmer pulled his beard and chuckled. "You know, that's exactly how I feel about my vegetables. So while you're here, you just take all the fresh vegetables you can eat." In this way, the land tiller got quality fertilizer for the farm, and the couple wound up with as many onions, new red potatoes, cucumbers, kohlrabi, and ears of sweet corn as they could eat.

Next, while they were camped out at their friend's, they discovered eight damaged fruit ladders, ranging from eight to 18 feet, just lying in the grass, left over from the time when the farm had been an orchard. After a quick huddle with the farmer, they had another deal on their hands.

Using the tools, scraps of lumber, and other odd hardware that they had on hand, it took the couple only a day to put all the ladders back into prime condition. Then the farmer selected four for himself, and the couple got the others. They were most useful, too, for that from that day on, whenever they negotiated deals with orchard owners to pick fruit, they could always say, "We have our own ladders and buckets," and they'd get the job.

Both families liked to dry fruits and vegetables, and just so happened that the farmer had a plastic-covered dome that warmed up fast when it was set out in the sun. So the vacationers arranged a third deal. Their friend would provide screening, a staple gun, and free access to his private junk lumber pile, and they would construct eight drying racks covered with fine fiberglass screening.

Then everyone would share the use of these frames. Well, they built the racks and dried some cherries on them, but when all was said and done, the couple didn't feel that they really came out even on the exchange. As luck would have it, this imbalance was corrected on a later date.

The couple and their children stayed at the farm for another week before moving on, but their swapping experiences didn't end then. After untold hours of work in the different orchards, they ended up with 1,200 pounds of cherries and 1,000 pounds of apricots and peaches to take home as a supplement to the cash wages that they were paid.

Another time, as they were uneventfully driving along at three o'clock in the morning, the tractor-trailer truck just ahead began to rain 50-pound sacks of chicken feed along the freeway. They salvaged $20 worth of the sacks and finally located a homesteading family that could use the feed. However, the homesteader's hens weren't laying many eggs at the time and their goats weren't giving much milk, so the travelers gave them the feed anyway with the promise of something interesting in return at a later date.

After a summer of traveling and trading, the family returned in mid-September to their friend's farm, only to find him in a bit of a quandary. He was burdened with a field of luscious, ripe, organically grown tomatoes for which he had no buyers. The local market was glutted, and those tomatoes wouldn't sell at even a few cents a pound.

Yet, 200 miles away over the mountains lay the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, where people were paying 10 times as much per pound for tomatoes of poor quality shipped all the way from Mexico. The couple's two-ton truck was just sitting idle, and both they and the farmer were interested in turning a handsome profit.

So, after they all spent the next three days picking and packing tomatoes, the husband started for the coast with nearly 4,000 pounds of perfect fruit and high expectations. 10 days later, he returned. It had been one of those disastrous treks where people don't keep all of their promises and containers unaccountably collapse, where opening hours and ferry ticket takers and food co-op buyers all seem to conspire against you, where nothing goes as planned.

The husband had sold tomatoes, traded tomatoes, dumped them on friends' doorsteps, thrown away rotten ones, and he had even taken the time to return home and can 400 pounds of the pulpy fruit. When he returned, he gave the farmer enough cash to cover the value of the goods that had survived the journey.

Still, the family had not only failed to make wages on the deal, they'd actually lost money. Their friend had accepted the risk of this venture along with them, however, and he compensated them for their loss with 800 pounds of acorn squash on the vine. During the husband's absence, the wife and children had begun drying and bottling the 20, 40-pound crates of tomatoes they received as part of their July hoeing swap.

So, they all continued to work on the fruit for more than a week, cutting off tops and bottoms of the juice-filled tomatoes to cook and bottle as sauce, and slicing the meaty centers into thin wheels, which, after four days on the drying racks, became tissue-thin slivers of potent flavor.

It was then that the drying rack swap finally balanced out. By the time they'd finished with the tomatoes, it was early October and grape-picking season. So, they bade farewell again to their friend on the farm and headed for a vineyard. They found a promising one, and the owner allowed them to camp on his property in exchange for helping them harvest grapes.

In addition, they were allowed to keep a pound of grapes for every 15 pounds they harvested. Grape-picking is interesting work. You get to eat a lot of the sugary, tart little fruits, which slows you down. You quickly develop purple hands, and occasionally you snip your fingers with the shears or get bitten by one of the mice that seems to savor grapes, too.

The vacationers continued to barter for things they needed. They discovered that the vineyard owner had quite a number of large, sturdy plastic crates designed to either stack or nest, and invaluable for shipping wine grapes. They were now cracked and useless. But the husband mended 10 of them with an electric drill and scraps of thin wire.

The owner was so pleased that he gave them five of the handy containers as payment for the work. About this time, they decided that they'd picked more than enough. They already had more squash, bottled tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, corn, onions, cull plums, and cull apples than they knew what to do with.

And some of the grapes they'd harvested for themselves were wilting. So they borrowed the owner's great press. The family pressed 500 pounds of muskets and gave the mash, the pulp left over from the pressing, to the vineyard owner for second wine. In the meantime, though, the family found that they had picked $9 worth of grapes, more than they'd earned, and they couldn't pay for them.

The owner at first agreed that they could make this up the following year. But before the group left, he came beaming to their truck to say that the musket mash they'd given him was well worth the overrun. Thus, the accounts were balanced after all. As the family departed the Similkameen Valley in their weary and heavily burdened truck, they found it necessary to make another swap.

A friend had driven their car out to the valley for them, but he was no longer around to drive it back. This meant they had two vehicles, the car and the two-ton truck to take home. But since the wife didn't drive, they had just one driver. Fortunately, they soon met a lady hitchhiker who readily agreed to drive the auto back and return for the free transportation.

Yet another exchange occurred when they stopped overnight at a hostel. There, they happily traded plums, tomatoes, and one crate of grapes for their supper and breakfast. And finally, upon arriving home, they still had an abundance of grapes and squash that could be traded for other produce, magazines and books, or any number of other items or services.

"What a summer of hard work," their friends exclaimed when told about the trip. Well, it was hard, but it was also a fun-filled adventure. They returned healthy and fit, and they had their children right there with them all that time. The whole family had made many friends and had experienced firsthand the tremendous effort and care that it took to produce the food they enjoyed in such abundance.

Now you take that story, do with it what you will, but don't think that in order to take your family on vacation that you have to drive 1,000 miles away, spending $100 a night at a hotel along the way in order to buy tickets to Disney World for 100 bucks a day in order to have a vacation.

There are other options, and I'll leave it to you to come up with the creative options that will help you.