Places I'm trying for this term:

• police station
• fire department
• grocery store bakery
• Lowe's
• nursery
• pumpkin patch
• art museum
• railroad museum

those are all good ideas. I had thought of some of those but not all

Here are some of ours

• bread factory (already went)
• salad dressing factory
• wolf sanctuary  http://www.wolfpeople.com/wolfstore/pages.php?pageid=4&js=n
• cat Tales zoological park http://www.cattales.org/
• fire station
• newspaper printing press https://secure1.spokesmanreview.com/srcirculation/NIE/Events_Tours/events_tours.html
• art museum (already went--saw T-Rex named Sue)
• pumpkin patch and apple orchards
• Clock tower at the park, we've been by it a zillion times in the park but have recently found out it is wound by hand once a week, how cool would that be to see http://www.spokaneriverfrontpark.com/content.php?id=86

Old Sturbridge Village in Mass.  had a homeschool day today.  It was great (even though it rained ALL DAY LONG).  95% of the visitor were homeschool families.  They had some classes for the kids to do, all kinds of demos.   And all for just us homeschoolers....(and a special discounted price too!!) 

I hail from Mass, and loved Sturbridge as a kid! That and Edeville Railroad were my favorite places to go every year. Ah, the memories!

How do you go about finding out how to get into these places?  I know you can just call up the local fire station and ask for a good time to stop by with the kids, but what about places like bakeries and stores?

I used a great book called The A-Z Guide to Home School Field Trips by Gregg Harris   ISBN 1568570813

It not only had lots of ideas of places to go, but gave the back ground and historical development of that type of place or business. Key concepts and principles about each destination or occupation was explained and illustrated.

Also there were questions you might want to ask when you are visiting.

There were various acitivities to increase the learning of the subject. 

There are key vocabulary words

And last Biblical prespectives on each subject studied.

I checked and there is one available now on swap

OOh! Thanks!

Oh, well apparently someone got there before me, because it's not available anymore. :-( Did you say the author was Gregg Harris? I didn't see his name anywhere on the description.

Yes it was by Greg Harris. 

We went to the post office today. I was mailing some PBS books, and just asked if they would do a tour for a homeschooler.

The lady said sure we do that, how about right now! So he had a unexpected Field trip !

Here our fire department and police station has open house. I get the county paper and watch for things like that.

We were getting our passports a couple months ago and had to go into the backroom for our pictures.  When the lady found out my son was homeschooled, she offered to give us a backstage tour and viola we had a field trip for the entire family.  :)  It was awesome!