Weekend Adventures That Cost Under $20 (For the Whole Family)

Your kids won’t remember the expensive resort. They’ll remember the time you built a fort in the living room and ate pizza on the floor. Here are 12 cheap wins.

Free

1. Backyard Campout

Pitch a tent, make s’mores on a portable grill, tell stories with flashlights. Same magic as camping, minus the 3-hour drive and forgotten sleeping bag. Pro tip: let the kids “pack” their own overnight bag like it’s a real trip — they take it way more seriously and it adds to the whole adventure feel.

2. Library Treasure Hunt

Most libraries have free programs, story times, and events. Challenge: each kid picks one book for themselves and one for someone else in the family.

3. Bike Ride to Nowhere

Pick a direction. Ride for 30 minutes. Turn around. Stop for a water break wherever looks interesting. No destination, no pressure.

4. Kitchen Science

Baking soda volcanoes, Mentos in Diet Coke, making slime. YouTube has a thousand kitchen science experiments. Budget: whatever’s already in your pantry.

Under $10

5. Dollar Store Art Supplies

Hit the dollar store. Each kid picks $3 worth of craft supplies. Go home and make something. Judge nothing. Hang everything on the fridge. You’d be amazed what they come up with when the materials are random — pipe cleaners, foam sheets, and googly eyes become surprisingly elaborate creatures.

6. Fishing at a Local Pond

A basic kids’ fishing rod is $12 (one-time cost). Worms from the yard are free. Even if you catch nothing, you sat by water and talked. That’s a win.

7. Garage Sale Saturday

Give each kid $5. Drive around to garage sales. They learn to budget, negotiate, and find treasure. You find vintage tools for nothing.

8. Park Picnic

Pack sandwiches, a picnic blanket, and a frisbee. Any park works. Bonus: no dishes to wash.

Under $20

9. Matinee Movie

Many theaters do $5-7 matinees. Four tickets = $20-28. Skip the concession stand — smuggle in your own snacks (everyone does it).

10. Bowling

Most alleys have family specials on weekend afternoons. Bumper lanes make it fun for little kids. Competitive dads: keep a family scoreboard at home.

11. Pick-Your-Own Farm

Strawberries, blueberries, pumpkins (seasonal). Kids love picking their own food. You pay by the pound and come home with a bucket of memories. Bring a wagon if you have little ones — those berry rows get long and short legs get tired fast.

12. Museum Free Day

Most museums have a free or discounted day each month. Check your local museum websites. The Burke Museum, MOHAI, and Museum of Flight in Seattle have these.

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The Real Cost Breakdown

Activity	Cost	Memory Value
Backyard campout	$0	Legendary
Theme park day	$300+	Exhausting
Library trip	$0	Solid
Resort vacation	$2,000+	Instagram-worthy
Fishing at a pond	$0	Timeless

The pattern is clear: cost and fun are not correlated.

One Rule

Put your phone in your pocket. The whole point is being present. Take one photo, then put it away.

Seasonal Picks

Not every activity works year-round. Here’s a seasonal rotation so you’re never stuck saying “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” on a Saturday morning.

Spring

Tulip fields. If you’re in the PNW, the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is basically mandatory. Rows and rows of insane color, and kids can run between them. Get there early on a weekday if you can — weekends are a zoo. Even outside the Northwest, most regions have u-pick flower farms that are worth the drive.

Summer

Berry picking. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries — farms are everywhere June through August. Bring sunscreen and a hat, and expect to eat half of what you pick before it makes it into the bucket. Bonus activity: come home and make jam or a cobbler together. That’s two adventures in one.

Fall

Leaf hunting and corn mazes. Grab a bag and see who can find the most interesting leaves — different colors, shapes, biggest, smallest. Press them in a book when you get home. Corn mazes run $5-10 per person at most farms and they’re the perfect level of “challenging but not scary” for younger kids.

Winter

Snow sledding. If you’re anywhere near mountains, a $15 plastic sled provides an entire day of entertainment. Pack a thermos of hot chocolate and extra dry gloves (always extra gloves). No snow? Indoor fort building with blankets and couch cushions is the cold-weather MVP.

The Adventure Jar

Here’s the move that eliminated our Saturday morning “what should we do” debate entirely.

Get a mason jar. Write every activity from this list (and your own ideas) on small slips of paper. Fold them up, toss them in. Saturday morning, one kid reaches in and pulls out a slip. That’s the adventure. No negotiations, no waffling, no spending 45 minutes debating while the morning disappears.

Color-code the slips if you want to get fancy: blue for free, green for under $10, yellow for under $20. That way you can pull based on the weekend’s budget.

The secret sauce: let the kids add their own ideas to the jar. They’ll come up with stuff you never would have thought of, and they’re way more excited about an adventure they “chose” themselves. Our jar currently includes gems like “dig for treasure in the backyard” and “build the world’s longest paper airplane.” Both turned out to be fantastic afternoons.

What’s your family’s favorite cheap adventure? Let us know!