Father’s Day gifts: 5 things to do with Dad for under $150

Father's Day gifts are around the corner, and we're spending the most Father's Day bucks this year on experiences. This suggests we want to spend time with Dad, more than anything. With that in mind, here are 5 suggestions for Father's Day outings that won't break the bank.

3. Air and space/Air Force museum (Free and up)

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Airplanes hang from the ceiling at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington in this 2010 file photo. Air Force and air and space museums are all over the country, and more often than not, you can enjoy them for free.

I hate to make a sweeping generalization about dads on Father's Day, but allow me just this one, based on 20-plus years of field evidence: Dads love planes. Happily, there are air and space museums all over the country, with admission prices that range from cheap to free. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum offers free admission, with fees for select exhibits and shows. In case you’re outside the Washington, D.C., area, military.com offers a directory of  aircraft and Air Force museums as well as other military museums and memorials around the country.

3 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.