There are many ways to discover the recreational facilities about you. A few ways are outlined below. The best general rule is, keep your eyes and ears open at all times. Much of the information about your own city or state is not available in printed form. The best way to find out about it is to make notes as you go along. When you hear two fishing enthusiasts talking over the trip they had last week-end, find out where they went and how they got there. If two skiing experts have returned from a day of sport in the near-by hills, they may know several places that could be recorded in your leisure scrapbook.

Another way of gathering information is to look about during your trips in the family car. It may be that in the fall you can see a good lake for skating or a likely skiing slope. Making a mental note of these places will help you enjoy them when the proper season of the year comes around.

Often there are helpful local publications on recreation facilities issued by the Chamber of Commerce or by the State Department of Recreation, if there is one in your state. If there is no Department of Recreation, write to the State Conservation Department. The United States government has one or two publications that show the recreation facilities by cities and counties. They can be purchased for a few cents from the Superintendent of Documents in Washington, D. C. (See the list of helps at the end of this chapter for further suggestions.)

A group of students could begin to build a file of information on their own county and state to be used by the other students in the school and by succeeding classes. Such a file could be added to each year and would soon become a valuable collection of data dealing with the many facilities that are near at hand.

Where Have You Been? In other words, if the family knows where reactional facilities are, within easy distance, they could use the automobile to much greater advantage. Young people can help the family to plan such trips and carry them out. An interesting thing to do is to make a list of all the places in the state to which your family has gone for some recreational activity. Then, in another column, list all of the other places that you can find which you think the family would be interested in visiting. You will no doubt be surprised to note how many attractive places there are that have never occurred to you in connection with the recreational activities of your family. Your parents might welcome the suggestion that they visit around instead of going to the same old place every time.

There might be some value in making a list by months of the interesting events that are scheduled in your state, to which the family might go as a group. No doubt there arc scores of such events, such as county fairs, state fairs, art exhibits, track meets, boating races, pageants, archery tournaments, and displays that arc simply being wasted as far as you are concerned because it never occurred to you to list them.

Why not make a family recreation schedule, listing such events as those suggested above and planning to see them with the use of the car? In this way the car ceases to be a bone of family contention and becomes a means of having some wholesome fun.