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The website ThriftyTraveling.com and its publications are the mind-children of Mary VanMeer, a prolific writer who has traveled extensively all of her life, and who has been profiled in Marquis’ Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America for many years.

During Mary’s elementary and secondary school years, her father Leo VanMeer (a published author, and a weekly newspaper columnist in the field of natural gardening for 13 years) was a high school teacher who had a three-month vacation every summer. The VanMeer family traveled throughout the United States and sometimes Canada every summer, usually camping . . . first with a tent, then a travel trailer, and finally a motor home.

While Mary was in college (Michigan State University; a summer at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she traveled on a student budget all over Europe; and then University of Florida), her thrifty parents continued to travel at least two months every summer in their motor home. At the end of each trip, they would always comment about how little they spent on the trip, how many free campgrounds they were able to uncover, and how amazed they were that there was no directory to free campgrounds available.

After graduation from the University of Florida (Gainesville) in 1970, Mary bought a camper-van and started exploring and researching these free campgrounds, traveling throughout the United States for nearly two years in her camper.

She ultimately settled in Clearwater, Florida, where she published a detailed 550-page guide to free campgrounds and a 450-page guide to free attractions for several years. However, tiring of the uncreative and time-consuming task of annually updating these books, she sold the book rights to another publisher.

She moved to Palm Beach, where she lived for two years, making new friends and enjoying the excitement of Palm Beach’s “social season” each year. One thing became remarkably clear to her. Palm Beachers love to travel, and they travel a LOT! Her friends would send her postcards from all over the world, and Mary wanted to see those places too. But her budget was dramatically different from her Palm Beach friends’ budgets; so she started researching “thrifty travel” to see if there weren’t some ways she could travel extensively without being “rich.”

Much to her joy, she began to uncover “thrifty traveling” secrets . . . first from books, magazines, and newspapers; and then from resources she followed up on as well as friends, family, and even strangers! Everyone seemed to have travel hints and discoveries that they wanted to share!

Deluged with this ever-expanding, new-found information, Mary felt that it was important to share these travel ideas with all thrifty travelers! So she began to publish the ThriftyTraveling.com Newsletter (which was originally called The Thrifty Traveler) in 1993; and later she wrote the book Thrifty Traveling which Barbara Shea in New York’s Newsday named as one of the best three travel books of the year in 1996.

Now she is bringing her thrifty traveling message to the world on her ThriftyTraveling.com website, where she enthusiastically and militantly endeavors to help everyone travel in a safe and stress-free way while at the same time stretching their travel dollars. 



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