As campus tours filled our weekends, we began turning prospective college visits with our teens into family vacations

• Sending two kids to college meant months of driving to and touring campuses as a family.
• So, I started turning our campus visits into "tour-cations" with day trips and fun local activities.
• While learning about schools, we spent time together visiting local restaurants and attractions.

When our two kids were getting ready to choose their colleges, our family's schedule seemed to get busier than ever.

For months, our school breaks and weekends were filled with the same monotonous routine: Drive several hours to a college, take a tour of the campus, and head back home.

Not only were these visits pretty rushed and stressful, but they were also monopolizing our free time as a family of four.

In an effort to make up for the vacation time we'd lost and make these visits even more valuable, I began completely changing how we planned — and viewed — them.

So, we combined campus tours with vacations and began going on "tour-cations."

Turning college visits into mini vacations took work, but it paid off

Most of the schools we visited were within five hours of our home, so we started staying in the area overnight so we didn't have to drive back after a long day.

Sometimes, we stayed at on-campus hotels to save money on parking and have easy access to our tours.

When possible, we tried to combine colleges that were relatively close to each other into one itinerary. For example, one trip included the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State, and the University of Alabama. Another focused on Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the University of Tennessee - Knoxville.

Before each trip, I laid out the destinations on the map as if we were going on a European vacation or cruise around the world, planning around VIP tours, honors-college visits, meals with current students, and admitted-student days.

While scheduling our on-campus sessions, I was also researching local recommendations in the towns near each school and along our routes.

We did our best to make the most of both our time on the road and near each school. We toured space centers, attended baseball games, stopped at dairy farms, found local gems we still dine at today, and even went on small day trips to see special landmarks, including the replica Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tennessee.

We ate in every college cafeteria while trying local off-campus favorites, from the iconic doughnuts at Mary Lou's near Purdue University to the memorable bites at Dreamland BBQ, just minutes from the University of Alabama.

When we visited colleges closer to home, I approached our tours with a similar spirit of adventure, doing my best to find new-to-us restaurants and cool attractions or shops we could check out nearby.

It was nice to have a plan, but I also found some of our most fun moments occurred when we got lost or simply asked the student tour guides where their favorite local spots were.

Our vacation-style college visits were a huge success

Although glamorous beach vacations are great, it was nice to get to explore colleges and their surrounding areas as a family.

Our kids were able to get a better view of where they might live for several years, and we parents gained more perspective about where they could end up, too.

Best of all, we got to spend time together. These little trips would be some of the last we'd take as a family before planning got more complicated with school breaks and busy work schedules.

In the end, both kids chose schools we "tour-cationed," and I hope the memories we made on our first visits last far beyond their college years.