Planning Our Road Course Retreat – CustomInk “T-shirts and Genes: Family Reunion Contest”

This post is brought to you by CustomInk. As always, any opinions expresses are my own.
If you are like millions of families across the globe, you probably have family members that live far away. If this resonates with you, how often do you get to see them? Depending on the miles that separate you and your travel budget, this can be limited to once a year, if you are lucky. For me, I am lucky, my parents live right in the same town. My youngest brother lives several states away. If I’m lucky I can see him, my sister-in-law and their son two or three times in a year. If the planets align and all goes well we all meet up on our annual family camping trip in August. With all of us only seeing one so infrequently, it makes it more important than ever to reconnect each year.

I’ve always considered our family vacation important. Some of the best memories I have are from the very same camping ground in Watkins Glen where we’ll be heading in just weeks. The folks at CustomInk, an online retailer that lets customers design and order customized apparel and accessories, did a customer survey recently and discovered some interesting things about family reunions.

43% of family reunions have 56+ attendees varying in ages from 1 month old to 75+ years of age.
1% of respondents have reunions once a year with 45% having one once every 2-4 years.
Activities engaged in at family reunions ranges but most popular are taking family portraits (70%), family games (56%) and sporting games (43%).
Many families up the activity game by purchasing custom gear for the reunion with 96% creating custom t-shirts and 15% creating custom drinkware (water bottles, koozies, etc.)
Time away with family is valuable! More than half (52%) of families travel between 50-250 miles with 67% traveling over 250 miles. Additionally, a majority (57%) of reunions last for an entire weekend or for an entire week (23%).

Because we have been making our yearly trip for almost 20 years now, here are a handful of tried and true tips for making sure that your summer family reunion is a smashing success. Here are my suggestions to make sure yours goes off without a hitch!
Plan In Advance: Seriously, before we leave our annual summer family reunion, a group of us are already planning for the following year! Due to timing and distance we have to. We literally reserve our camping spot for the next year while we’re camping. Travel expenses can really mount up. Even driving, as we all do, isn’t cheap. We all have to start planning as early as possible if we’re going to make it happen.
Set the Date: This may be the hardest thing about planning any reunion. If you cannot agree on a date, no one is going to show up! Of course, you won’t be able to please everyone, but the majority is what you are aiming for. Ours happens to be easy, ours is always on the weekend of the Nascar race, since that’s part of what we go up there for.
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Pick a Theme: As often as possible, we try and choose a theme for our summer family reunion. This makes planning the activities in particular much easier. This year, we are going to attend the NASCAR race, so that is our theme for the year. If you are going to an amusement park that can be the theme. And if you happen to be fortunate enough to live within driving distance of family members, a theme can still be lots of fun! Some themes that are easy to pull together for family members that live in the same region include family game night, movie night, backyard obstacle course, decorating & crafts, and a good old-fashioned family dinner or barbeque
Personalize It: One thing we make sure we do is to personalize our summer family reunion. This makes it fun, easy to keep up with people and memorable. One must have item for every summer family reunion is to order a tee shirt from of CustomInk, an online retail company that engages customers to design and order customized apparel and accessories.

If you have ever seen a huge group of people wearing the same shirt, it is ¬usually a school or church group or a family reunion! It may sound silly, but I can’t wait to show off the shirts I customized at CustomInk! It was so much fun to plan the theme and personalize it for each member of the family. What a better way to bring some cohesiveness into your family get together than a customized shirt and/or accessory from CustomInk. The folks at CustomInk feel this is a way to bring the family together in more than just proximity.

One of the things we do while we’re up on the mountain is go to the gokart track. This is a ton of fun! We’re all pretty competitive so we often all try to go on at the same time. It would be a real blast to see our gang all together on the gokart track racing each other!
Currently, CustomInk is sponsoring a fun contest with a chance to win $1,500 to celebrate family togetherness, custom products from CustomInk, and access to a professional photographer that will capture moments at your family event (grand prize valued at $4,000). The CustomInk T-shirts and Genes: Family Reunion Contest is easy to enter and runs through 6/25/2015 at 11:59pm EST. You just need to upload a photo of yourself and at least three family members and in 150 words or less, tell them how you would use the $1,500 from CustomInk to help unite your family this year. You can encourage friends and family to vote for your entry by sharing it on social media. This contest ends soon so enter now!
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