TravelMamas.com is giving away a two-night stay at any Hilton Garden Inn. Leave a comment on her blog post naming the Hilton Garden Inn you would like to visit and why by 11:59 pm Pacific time Sunday October 30, 2011.
Travelmamas.com is a ‘travel with kids’ oriented blog and resource site by Colleen Lanin. I went through a few web pages and found some good travel information on a variety of places.
Traveling without kids has been my life’s objective so I confess I spend very little time on family travel sites.
Loyalty Traveler’s Nanny Diary
My wife and I worked two summers in Seal Harbor, Maine in the mid-90s as nannies for a boy and a girl infant twins of a Manhattan lawyer and wife. It was kind of a nice gig as we lived in a large house for free surrounded by Acadia National Park.
Maine is ‘vacationland’ and the coastal towns where we were public schoolteachers in Downeast Maine had few year round residents in coastal homes primarily owned by out-of-staters. The majority of coastal homes were closed most of the year and the few homes for rent were only 10-month September to June rentals.
Our $600 a month rental house during the 10-month school year was located directly on the rocky beach of Lamoine, the town just north of Mount Desert Island. Our windows looked out across Frenchman Bay and Cadillac Mountain. I truly believed at the time that living in the house in Lamoine would likely be the most beautiful views we would ever experience in our lives from a full-time residence. We had to move out of the house for the two summer months when the rent increased to $2,000 a week for July and August. We camped outside in the Maine woods for the weeks when we were not summer nannies during our two years living on the Maine coast.
The nanny job was in a three story historic summer rental home in Seal Harbor on the southeastern coast of Mount Desert Island.
The children’s parents were gone much of the time and my wife and I had many peaceful hours raising an adorable boy and girl in a large house with all the amenities. The kids came fully furnished with a library of newly bought children’s books, toys, designer outfits, prepackaged specialty food items, and a country club membership.
We were paid a $1,000 a week to care for the children’s every need. It was a decent summer job considering we only made $19,000 a year as full-time public school teachers in the area. The abysmal teacher pay is why we returned to California after two years.
One of my fondest nanny memories is picking wild blueberries on the grounds around the Seal Harbor house while imitating sounds from the classic children’s book ‘Blueberries for Sal’ by Maine author Robert McCloskey. The children had refused to eat store-bought blueberries all summer until the late August day we picked wild blueberries from shrubs low on the ground and dropped the berries into a pail with a ‘kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk’.
Leave your comment on TravelMamas.com Hilton Garden Inn Giveaway for a chance to win two free nights.
Comments are always welcome here, but Loyalty Traveler is not giving away the free nights at Hilton Garden Inn and a comment here does not enter you into the giveaway.
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