Travel advice and reports for families considering a “volunteer vacation” or other form of public service
For those heading to Orlando this spring break — and millions of parents and kids do (www.visitorlando.com) — there is an ever-growing array of unique VIP adventures to help you get away from the crowds and, hopefully, up the memory quotient. Some are inexpensive, requiring just a little advance planning, but others can cost big bucks, not including park admission, of course.
At a farmer’s market, kids can learn that food in season is more nutritious and tastes better because it is fresh. They can “eat greener” by opting for foods that are local rather than flown or trucked across the country. At the San Francisco farmer’s market, you can taste a kind of pear you’ve never seen or a Quince and ask the farmer how it’s grown.
One day last fall—Oct 14, 2010 to be precise—a bulldozer operator named Jesse Steele, working on the expansion of the Ziegler Reservoir for the Snowmass Water and Sanitation District, discovered a bone. But not just any bone—an Ice Age mammoth bone. That was just the beginning
These kids may look like any group of young snowboarders decked out in the latest Burton gear. “You can see them stand taller,” Heston said. But looks, as we know, can be deceiving. They can’t afford snow sports or the gear, much less bus fare to the mountain. In fact, some live in homeless shelters, others live in group homes
Wherever you find yourself this holiday season, make time to visit a museum — even if you take in just one exhibit. Museums are a great way to get the gang out of grandma’s house for a couple of hours, especially when it’s too cold to hit the local playground. And if you are a member of your local art, science or children’s museum, you may find that membership gets you in for free.
Over the holidays, we tend to let down our guard and “ maybe we don’t pay attention as closely because we are catching up with friends and family, and everyone is sleeping less, is more fatigued and, therefore, more accident prone,” concedes Dr. Alison Tothy, the pediatric ER medical director at Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago and a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Perhaps that’s one reason Dr. Tothy says ER visits for children increase during the holidays.
I love to see people live their dreams whether on vacation or at home. But sometimes, that dream is all too fleeting. All 11-year-old Shannon Tavarez wanted to do was perform on stage. She beat out hundreds of children in an open audition to win the role of Nala in The Lion King on Broadway.
We’re riding in a truck on a photo caravan into the heart of the large animal enclosures, which means, as we bump along, we get up close to not only the rhinos (Southern white, as well as greater one-horned) but also the giraffes (try feeding leaves to two giraffes at once!), Springbok, Cape buffalo, ostrich, Defassa Waterbuck, zebras and more.
Where else can you hold a hissing cockroach, hang on to a “shooting star” (actually a 4.5 billion year old meteorite), use real bones to solve a mystery CSI-style or, as I did, see what you’d look like as an early human
Everyone visiting NewYork for the first time needs a friend like Coreen Bourke. The lifetime New Yorker and retired phone company administrator was our designated Big Apple Greeter (www.bigapplegreeter.org), volunteering her time to show visitors like us the New York neighborhoods she knows so well. It’s a free service underwritten by generous donors.
Imagine if you could only get into your office or house via toeholds carved into rock. Imagine cooking by tossing a hot rock into a waterproofed basket filled with stew fixings and grinding corn with a rock. Imagine living with your family in small stone rooms. Imagine no TV or video games to entertain the kids — just stories passed down from generation to generation
Travel back to the 18th century and you can even ask a British Regular, famous for their red coats, what it was like to serve so far from home where everyone seemed to hate them. (Not so much different from today, is it?) Watch the Regulars’ Changing of the Guard at the site of their original garrison at Faneuil Hall Marketplace.
For once, Michelle Obama isn’t creating a trend. She’s doing what’s trendy. I’m talking about her mother-daughter trip to Spain this week with Sasha while Malia is at sleep away camp.
You can learn a little, or a lot, of Olympic history in Lake Placid at the Olympic Center.
We’re at Hall of Human Origins, the newest exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, now celebrating its centennial year. (It’s the most visited of the 19 Smithsonian museums with 7.4 million visitors last year!) It’s the most visited museum in the country and has the most visited science museum in the world. It’s easy to see why. Even kids who profess to “hate science” can’t help but love this 21st-century museum.
This past weekend, I sat on the National Mall facing the Capitol in Washington, DC as Michelle Obama extolled the new graduates of George Washington University to broaden their horizons through travel abroad, working to help those less fortunate wherever they go.
It is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and the travel industry’s websites are falling all over each other to tell you what they are doing to be green and how we can all travel greener. But really, it is little things — like carrying reusable water bottles or hanging up towels after you use them that can help make difference
Who says you have to spend hours in a museum? Sometimes, even an hour is enough—especially with kids. While in Manhattan, I stopped in late in the afternoon at The Jewish Museum especially to see one exhibit—Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H.A. Rey.
The centerpiece of Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey Bay, CA is the massive Monterey Bay Aquarium . It’s an incredible structure which includes some of the largest fish tanks in the world and some of the most elusive creatures in our oceans
This quaint little ski area in the Green Mountains near Burlington, VT., is known for its hospitality and public service – hosting both the Burton’s great Chill Organization as well as the Vermont Adaptive Sports program