When someone in the family has special challenges
Adaptive sports programs are about much more than the activities themselves, Disabled Sports USA, has some 124 chapters across 42 states, including 75 at ski resorts
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Beach Vacations | Destinations | Families & Groups | Getting There | Lodging | Volunteer & Service | Weekly Column
Vacationing like a 1 percenter in a staffed villa in Jamaica
It’s easy to see why these vacations are so popular with multigenerational families. No one is doing all the chores that typically come with a house rental.
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Bringing City of Light to City of Stars
The Walt Disney Concert Hall never fails to deliver exquisite music to its audience, especially with the current on-going concert series: City of Lights: A Century of Music From Paris.
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Winter Park’s adaptive sports program changes lives for disabled kids and adults
By Eileen Ogintz WINTER PARK, CO – Fifteen-year-old Kati Leasure can’t walk or talk very well and has progressive loss of muscle control as a…
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Backyard Vacations | Destinations | Families & Groups | Travel Diaries | Volunteer & Service | Weekly Column
Huge Expansion at National WWII Museum, New Orleans
Welcome to The National WWII Museum’s newest exhibit: The Road to Tokyo which retraces the soldiers’ journey from Pearl Harbor ultimately to Tokyo Bay by many routes in Asia and the Pacific
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City lights. No cameras. Lots of action.
Wearing a gray hoodie and sunglasses, a suspicious man was trying to debrief us while also not being noticeable. This was: Accomplice the Show: Greenwich Village.
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Destinations | Families & Groups | Food and Dining | Parks & Outdoors | Volunteer & Service | Weekly Column
Discovering the history and culture of Berlin, Germany
From the time the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961 till it was torn down in November 1989, thousands of East Berliners made their escape the short distance to the West in the most ingenious ways. At least 2,000 died trying. Today, it’s hard to believe this beautiful city was once divided by an ugly wall.
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Meeting the people through a unique program in Jamaica
We are visiting Doris Morgan, who has been welcoming tourists—more than 1000—since the mid-1980s, showing them a bit of Jamaican cuisine and culture through the little publicized Meet the People program. Did I mention she does this for free and that there is no charge to the tourists?
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Remembering Stein Eriksen; Rooting for Jake Burton Carpenter
Stein Eriksen, a founder of modern skiing, has died in Park City, UT at 88. Meanwhile, Jake Burton Carpenter, 62, is making an amazing recovery from a life-threatening illness.
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Cruises & All-Inclusive | Destinations | Families & Groups | Parks & Outdoors | Travel Diaries | Volunteer & Service
A fortress castle, a toy museum and a huge Christmas market
Nuremberg has long been a center of toy making and this museum is one of the city’s top tourist attractions. More than a dozen local toy manufacturers developed model railways and Nuremberg’s toymakers were known for coming up with new ways to make toys move.
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Exploring Jewish Berlin – dark history and revival
You can’t visit Berlin without considering the horror of the Holocaust–the six million European Jews (600,000 of them German-born) who perished. Countless others had their lives uprooted, among them millions of children. Germany’s capital city confronts the horror head-on at places large and small.
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Berlin – at Checkpoint Charlie and the Spy Museum
The idiosyncratic Mauer Museum at Check Point Charlie that is at the original border crossing between the Cold War American and Soviet sectors of Berlin. The location is no accident.
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Volunteering on Vacation: Memorable Adventures from Family Trips
When the two Whitaker teens talk about their holiday trip to Tanzania two Christmases ago, it’s not the animals they saw on safari that proved the most memorable, as amazing as the elephants and giraffes were. It’s how they helped a small unofficial orphanage.
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Backyard Vacations | Destinations | Families & Groups | Food and Dining | Lodging | Volunteer & Service | Weekly Column
So much invention in Seattle: Inspiration for Kids
The Museum of History and Industry, now in the historic Naval Reserve Armory at Lake Union Park, boasts the largest heritage organization in Washington State with nearly 4 million artifacts. It is a good place to start any family visit to Seattle.
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Innovation on display at Seattle Museum
Seattle has always been a center of innovation and it’s on display at the Bezos Center of Innovation at the Museum of History and Industry. Did you know the Native Americans and traders invented a whole new language?
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A haunting visit to an elementary school in Hiroshima
I’ve got chills as Amber Whaley, 12, and her friend Miko Uno, 11, lead us into their elementary school’s basement. This was all that was all that remained of the Honkawa Elementary School when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 70 years ago this past August 6.
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Hiroshima school: memorial and symbol of peace
The Honkawa Elementary School is in the heart of Hiroshima and when the Atomic Bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, all but one of the 420 students and teachers perished. Today is a again a bustling school and a memorial to those who died.
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Religion, education, culture at Indy Children’s Museum
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the largest children’s museum in the world, hopes to inspire children—and their families—to think about religion in new ways with the opening of National Geographic Sacred Journeys on Aug 29.
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Destinations | Families & Groups | Food and Dining | Parks & Outdoors | Travel Diaries | Volunteer & Service
Enesi’s excellent adventure in the Dominican Republic – Part 2
Sixteen-year-old Enesi Domi shares his daily diary from a youth service experience in the Dominican Republic with the community service organization Rustic Pathways. This is the second of two installments. More than 5000 youths will go on Rustic Pathways service trips this year.
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Enesi’s excellent adventure in the Dominican Republic – Part 1
Sixteen-year-old Enesi Domi shares his daily diary from a youth service experience in the Dominican Republic with the community service organization Rustic Pathways. This is the first of two installments. More than 5000 youths will go on Rustic Pathways service trips this year.
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At Scotland’s Fort George: a youth bagpipe band
Tour buses took us to Fort George, where the Inverness Youth Band with 30-plus members –drummers as young as nine and led by adults are “Beating Retreat,” performing a traditional military ceremony 16th Century England.
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Learning about the origins of the Titantic in Belfast
We are on day two of our cruise aboard the Windstar yacht Star Legend – the Gaelic Explorers tour. We’ve anchored in Portrush and taken an excursion bus for the one-hour trip to Belfast to learn about the building of the Titantic.
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Backyard Vacations | Destinations | Families & Groups | Food and Dining | Lodging | Snow Vacations | Volunteer & Service
Boarding, burgers and teen bonding in Bolton Valley, VT
A high school junior and scholar in the A Better Chance program writes about a weekend of snowboarding fun and bonding time with his housemates in Bolton Valley, VT.
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Backyard Vacations | Destinations | Families & Groups | Parks & Outdoors | Volunteer & Service | Weekly Column
Families get acquainted with Thomas Jefferson at historic Monticello
It is only fitting that the home of our third president and the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence is so kid friendly. Jefferson was very fond of his 12 grandchildren, many of whom lived here with him after his retirement.
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Special challenges for special kids in Crested Butte CO
Tony suffers from dwarfism and is autistic. But here at Crested Butte’s Adaptive Sports Center, he literally is king of the hill.
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Teen Ambassadors offer unique perspective on 9/11 Memorial Museum
David Rothblatt and Fia Hargil are among the six members of the inaugural class of teen ambassadors trained to work with children who visit the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened at the new World Trade Center this past May.
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Winter is a great time for a family visit to a zoo or aquarium
The human kiddos laugh and giggle at the antics of the animals all day at the St. Louis Zoo. It’s one of three major free zoos left in the country along with the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.
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At the 9/11 Memorial Museum with unique teen guides
David Rothblatt has been a New Yorker all his life but his sole memory of 9/11 was being with his mom as she searched for a store to buy milk. Fia adds that next year’s high school freshmen will have been born after 9/11. “Kids need to know even if it is hard,” she and David agreed.
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The New York Met and Madame Tussauds with teens
If only the Metropolitan Museum of Art had life-sized wax figures of Degas, Monet and Picasso. I’m joking, of course, but I was thinking that watching how much fun our group of high schoolers was having at MME Tussauds NYC.
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Backyard Vacations | Destinations | Families & Groups | Parks & Outdoors | Volunteer & Service | Weekly Column
Teaching the kids about civil rights at our national monuments
If you want to expand on what the kids are learning in school, then head to a national park. That’s right. There are many national historic sites that figured into the fight against slavery and the civil rights movement and are ideal for out-of-the-classroom learning opportunities, especially when so many are offering special activities this month.
