Your summer vacation just started, but ours just came to a close.

What I did on my summer vacation, the Sabatini Art Gallery’s 2009 annual exhibit for children, saw 4419 “vacationers”—532 of whom were school children from 15 different group tours—HOORAY!

Constance Ehrlich’s paintings were a big hit with kids and adults alike. Toys vacationing at famous landmarks—ie Yoda at Giza, a Stormtrooper at the Great Wall—caused screams of delight, but also allowed us to sneak in a 6-week world geography lesson—gotcha! In our smaller gallery, the Edward Wilder Jewel Box, we created an interactive 3-d world map marking all the places Ehrlich’s toys visited, including historic and statistical information about each site’s importance, and asked people to draw and list their dream vacation spots and place them on the map.

And to dispel any myths about Kansas being boring and having nothing cool to do, we brought Pam Grout’s book, Kansas Curiosities (917.81 GRO), to life by marking each town she visits on a 5x3-foot, 3-d state map. Through this we hoped to inspire recession-friendly, in-state vacations, which can be less expensive for travelbugs on a budget but supportive of our local economies.

Click the images below to see exhibit and programming fun, and to read comments left in our guestbook: