Cheap treasured holiday

Of all the family holidays of my childhood the one I liked the best was a simple week long cheap holiday in a rented cottage. The morning following our arrival my sister and I found a bottle floating quite close to the shoreline. (my father said it was an antique bottle) With our fathers help we retrieved the bottle and found that it contained a treasure map. We extracted the map to find that it had detailed descriptions of all the surrounding garden with distances from the cottage measured in footsteps. There was of course a big red X in the middle of the map. The map was drawn on very old looking brown paper which our father called parchment paper.

What we as children did not know until many years later was that our father had spent all of the first night of the holiday preparing this elaborate plan for his children. He paced out all the distances and marked all the landmarks on the treasure map. He somehow aged the map (most likely he rubbed it in the soil) He had brought the parchment’ paper with him along with a red sealing wax and an exotic looking empty wine bottle.

Simple holidays, simple pleasures are never forgotten by children who experience them. This was a cheap holiday by today’s standards and could be replicated by modern parents strapped for cash. I believe that my father got as much pleasure from the holiday as his children did. We all enjoyed discovering every nook and cranny of the cottage and its ample garden (of course my father assisted us sufficiently well to make sure we only got to the treasure on the final day of the holiday).

Incidentally, the treasure consisted of candy, obviously, and 2 beautiful story books, all wrapped carefully inside the old tin box we dug up. The books were delightful and we read them on the long drive home. We never wondered, for one minute, how the books were pristine and new.

Tags: Antique bottle, cheap holiday

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Cheap treasured holiday