Vacation Tips: Hot, Hot Days of Summer

I'm in Florida this week, and most of next week, so I had the idea of sharing vacation tips with you all instead of my usual blogging. Yesterday we were at Epcot and today we were at Disney's Hollywood Studios. The local weather gal is claiming we may set a heat record here tomorrow. Lucky us. Our little group consists of me, my husband, our sons who are 16 and 17, our daughter who is ten, and my mother in law and father in law who are 65 and 68. We are trying to do things as inexpensively as possible. We saved for this trip, so we could take it before our oldest son graduates from high school next year.

Today I want to talk about hydration-making sure you don't dehydrate during a visit to an amusement park.

First off, drinking water is something you NEED to do when going to any kind of amusement park in the summer. Combine it with soda, tea or other beverages but make sure everyone drinks water. When the temperatures are in the 90's and you are walking all day long, ignoring the need for water can make you sick. Second, buying drinks for a family can break you, even without food. A bottle of water at Disney is 2.50, and other drinks are anywhere from 3.00-4.00 dollars. Multiply that times seven, and that's a lot of money. One bottle each is NOT enough. So, what did I do?

We bought 24 bottles of water for $3.99 and we froze 7 of the bottles overnight. I brought an extra backpack that we put the bottles in, and the guys all took turns carrying the water. We wrote our initials on the caps with a Sharpie marker I had brought along. This really worked well. The ice melted fairly quickly, so we drank about half a bottle, then added more water from a drinking fountain to the ice that was left. After that we kept filling them at drinking fountains. I'm guessing we drank 3-4 bottles each. That would have cost us $70.00 JUST for water!

We could have bought plastic water bottles and filled them at the hotel in the morning, but the water here smells and tastes terrible. I'm sure other parts of Florida are fine, but where we are near Disney, the city water is down right nasty. That would be a good option if you are going on a day trip to an amusement park from home.

Small things really can make a difference, both in terms of a budget, and taking care of ourselves. Dehydration can easily turn your vacation into a trip to an Emergency Department, which is not a good thing.

~Brenda, on location from Florida (that's my hot weather look above!)