It’s worth the effort, I promise, to take the kids and grandkids. For a few hours you can forget the baking, the shopping and the wrapping and just enjoy the holidays and each other.
Let’s play the what-if game. What if Mother Nature derails your holiday travel plans — as it did for so many people I know earlier this month during Hurricane Sandy and during the Christmas blizzard that crippled the East Coast two years ago?
I couldn’t help but smile as I looked out at the room filled with family travel writers and bloggers, some with their kids beside them, busily learning how to become better travel communicators.
Our first day on the mountain my daughter’s instructor got her set up with a bi-ski and we all headed out onto the lift. It was a short run and I’m not sure if I breathed the whole way down, anxiously wondering how she was doing. We got to the bottom of the run and I was greeted by a wide smile. Game o!.
Inevitably, we’ll reminisce about less-than-perfect Thanksgiving gatherings, like the time we arrived back home at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago to discover our car battery was dead, or the time in Connecticut our dog devoured the homemade pate a cousin brought to Thanksgiving dinner before anyone had a bite.
The view of Lake Michigan from my windows changed my perspective of the great lake and forced me to concede in the everlasting debate I had held with my native Chicagoan friends – that the shores of Lake Michigan are worthy of the title “beach.”
The Hall of North American Mammals, with its famous mammal dioramas, includes several that recreate scenes from national parks and monuments that Theodore Roosevelt helped preserve and protect.
Ten-year-old Charlie Baker writes: When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn’t have any power in my New Jersey town. A lot of the families left and went to grandma’s house, but my grandma lives in Manhattan and we couldn’t get there because there was a lot of traffic and a giant crane was hanging nearby. So we had to figure out where else to go. My mom ended up surprising us with a trip to the Great Wolf Lodge.
The Disney resorts have just announced Limited Time Magic for all of 2013 –52 weeks of what they promise will be magical experiences that appear, then disappear as the next special surprise debuts.
it’s worth checking out a bike tour wherever you are visiting with the kids. You can bike along the new beach promenade in Clearwater, Fla., or sample Portland’s famous local eats on a Bites by Bike tour that claims it is the best in the country for cyclists, offering an extensive network of trails.