Adventure Starts Here.
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Eleven year old Izzie Alley, who is from suburban New York, is looking around the converted garage where the Strauss Family is living while their…
Whether you are splitting your time between a volunteer project, there is lot for a family to see and do in and around New Orleans
I think New Orleans is a great city to encourage kids to sample food they might not have tried before (Turtle Soup, or fried alligator anyone?) Every restaurant has its own version of gumbo, the rich seafood stew. But there are also plenty of places to get a burger, pasta or chicken fingers. Here’s just a sampling of the good eats I enjoyed in my few days in New Orleans recently. And I certainly left my diet at home (unfortunately).
This is a tale of two cities — literally. Walk the narrow streets of the French Quarter, where I was staying in the historic Hotel Monteleone with its Carousel Bar that turns (once a haven for writers) and the city that was devastated by hurricane Katrina in Aug 2005 seems back to normal. But go just a few miles, and it’s clear to see that all is not yet well in New Orleans.
There are all the other kids onboard (more than a million children cruise every year, reports the Cruise Lines International Association, more than 1,000 on each Disney ship) and organized kids’ and teen activities from morning until night. “You’ll find a friend on the first day,” promises Brooke Abzug, 10, who likes the shipboard scavenger hunts staged by the kids’ clubs.
What are you waiting for? Spring Break is looming and you haven’t planned a getaway. We’re not talking a Big Trip — a cruise, for example, or an adventure trip to Costa Rica, though, according to Travelzoo.com, there are good last-minute deals to be had in Costa Rica.
I just got back from New Orleans and it was packed with spring breakers. They were doing their share of drinking on Bourbon Street but they were also doing their share of helping to clear debris and build houses in neighborhoods that still have not rebounded nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina.
A gem of a mountain (no lift lines here!) just minutes on a free, festively painted shuttle bus from the tiny (less than 2,500 people) town of Mt. Crested Butte, so steeped in mining history that most of the downtown area, with its wooden, multicolored, 19th-century buildings, is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Ever see a two-story outhouse?)
We’re in family ski trip mode. Everyone having a big bacon and eggs breakfast in pajamas. A lot of teasing is afoot. Thirteen year old Eva decides she’ll ski with us rather than go to ski school. We’re all impressed at how well she skis.
Mel seems to be rebounding from her fall and disappointment during the Junior Extremes qualifying run down a terrifyingly steep slope. Everyone has been telling her it’s a lot better to give your all than to not try. That she didn’t succeed just goes with the territory. It helps when she learns a lot of other kids fell on the same run.
All Mel wants is to qualify, which means skiing in control down what looks to me like a sheer cliff studded with rocks and boulders! Only about half of the teens who are here will actually qualify.
It’s a perfect blue sky day. The sun is shining…the snow crisp under our snowshoes. There’s hardly anyone else out on the trail — just a few other snow shoers and Nordic skiers with their dogs, and an occasional snow mobiler. We see the tracks where hardy skiers have come to back country ski, hiking up so they can ski down pristine powder.
It wasn’t the choice of restaurant that was making me so happy this particular Saturday night. It was that we’d survived a day of college touring in Boston without a melt down, without stalking off a campus, without tears and with everyone still speaking-and even more surprising, smiling.
The first phase is the new Lodge at Mountaineer Square and the Mountaineer Conference Center where we’re staying, just steps from the lifts.
The lodge and conference center wrap around a cozy courtyard, in which guests can find visitor services, dining and shopping. Here the Crested Butte Adventure Center serves as the “resort concierge,” a one-stop shopping venue.
Organized chaos. Three adults, four college kids, two teens, and a five year-old and three year-old getting ready for a ski day. I‘ve got a sinus infection so I opt not to ski today. I take 13-year-old Eva to the “teen” class. Ellen Osterling, who oversees the kids’ programs, says the ski school tries to offer teen classes every day — even if they have to send out a teen with his own instructor.
We’re heading to Crested Butte Mountain Resort in Colorado to meet up with an assortment of family, all staying at a condo in the spanking new Lodge at Mountaineer Square, which is part of the hundreds of millions of dollars of improvements here.
Even better, no more soggy hotdogs or lukewarm mac and cheese for lunch and no more putting kids on the chairlift with strangers: the entire class can ride up with their instructor on a six-passenger chairlift and eat together on the mountain. The teens and tweens, of course, will love the parks and pipes and the night skiing this resort is famous for.
Five years is too long between vacations. Just ask Amy and Matt Wilcher. The Ohio couple hasn’t had a vacation since their Caribbean honeymoon five years ago. Now that they’re parents, they’re contemplating an entirely different kind of getaway with their 2-year-old daughter
The Utah Olympic Park was the venue for Nordic jumping, bobsled, luge and skeleton events during the 2002 Winter Olympics here. Today, world class athletes train here — you may see them if you visit Tuesday through Saturday. They train in summer as well as winter. Today the Park also continues to serve as a year-round competition site.
Let’s hear it for a place that loves families. “We want to make it easier for them,” says The Canyons Ski School Director Barry Stout. He notes that the “Cat’s “ program for 4-6 year olds not only is one stop shopping but guarantees a 3:1 ratio. There are three terrain parks and six natural half pipes as well as plenty of hike-to terrain for those craving the steeps and the deeps.
Welcome to Antonin Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, www.sagradafamilia.org , Barcelona’s most famous site and Spain’s most visited. More than 40 years after the eccentric and revered architect’s death – he was struck by a tram – work still continues on the huge church first begun in 1882. Some 2.5 million people visited last year.
Holly, a single mom of three, was an Olympian and World Cup champion. She skied on the US Ski team for 10 years. She raced from the time she was eight until her late 20s. But she knows that most of the women who sign up for her clinic aren’t world class athletes.
For me, it’s later in the afternoon at the top of a gnarly, bumpy steep run called Grizzly. I can’t figure out where in the bump to turn. I’m afraid to point my skies downhill. It’s so steep! The bumps are so big! But I square my shoulders and say I’m not going to let the mountain defeat me.
I’m nervous. The rest of the women in the room are excited and upbeat. We’ve gathered from around the country on this very snowy morning at The Canyons resort in Park City Utah to work on our skiing with former Olympian Holly Flanders and her hand-picked crew of women’s coaches.
When families told Park City Mountain Resort they didn’t like such big ski school classes for their kids, the resort did something about it — besides suggesting parents pay mega pucks for private lessons.
By Eileen OgintzTribune Media Services Old Faithful spews thousands of gallons of steaming water right on schedule, but Miguel isn’t the least bit interested. He…
You gotta hate that guy. The guy sitting next to you on the plane, at the pool or the chairlift who can’t stop bragging about the fantastic vacation deal he snared that saved his family big bucks.
Mary Blilie had been at Big Sky Resort in Montana for just one day but had already snapped more photos of her kids than she had in a long time. That’s because when Blilie, now a Minneapolis engineer, was a kid her family skied here every winter and now, after a 17-year hiatus, she was determined to create some of those same happy memories for her own two children
Your next-door neighbor insists he has the skinny on finding bargain lodging (you can find rooms, especially in winter for well under $100 a night). One friend says she wouldn’t leave home without “Birnbaum’s Walt Disney World 2007,” the official guide to Walt Disney World, while a co-worker says her bible is the “Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World.”
Did you know Yellowstone has more thermal feature than anywhere in the world? And I’d rather visit in winter anytime. The last time we were here in the summer, there were so many people, the kids could barely see Old Faithful. Now we’re hiking in snowshoes around the geyser basin and there’s no one but us and Miguel.
Mother Nature, my daughter Mel says, delivered the best Christmas present of all — more than a foot of fresh snow. But unlike other ski resorts during a holiday week, there are no lift lines and no crowds. Where is everyone?
The good news is that it’s snowing — dumping snow actually. The bad news is that it’s snowing — so hard that there’s hardly any visibility Even my die hard skiers don’t want to move from the cabin. They’re watching an ER marathon. When do we get to do that at home?
By Eileen Ogintz Tribune Media Services It’s two days before we leave for a trip out West and my husband can’t find his hiking boots….
Other families I meet around the village at the Base of Big Sky are equally enthusiastic about the ski school. The mountain is big but the ski school is small “and that’s important” says Lori Woolbright, who is back for her third holiday here with her husband and eight year old daughter from Myrtle Beach, SC.
That’s the thing about Big Sky — it’s at the same time a mountain known for its steeps and deeps with the most with moonlight Basin next door — the most terrain in the country – 5,512 skiable acres and a 4,350 foot vertical drop. There’s enough extreme terrain at the top of the tram to satisfy my kids but also plenty of wide open blue terrain for those like me nursing a bad knee.
It’s seven in the morning and we’re ensconced in a cozy log cabin with a stone fireplace at Big Sky Ski Resort. I smell bacon and coffee — my husband is cooking us a hearty breakfast before our first day on what is billed as “the biggest skiing in America.” I’m hoping my kids will love here that Big Sky allows access to some of the country’s biggest vertical drops and steepest lift accessed terrain anywhere
Have you ever gone to a party on the wrong day? When we arrive Christmas afternoon, the hosts and their kids clearly aren’t expecting company. In fact, we catch them snoozing. But we barge in anyway — we have come so far, after all, to see them. Our hosts, the Sea Lion family, live on San Cristobal island in the Galapagos
Let’s hear it for innkeepers who always have a smile for their guests — and everyone else who is struggling to keep smiling when hosting family this holiday season, when the visiting toddler drops Goldfish everywhere and the teen refuses to be roused before noon from the family room sofa bed. Did I mention the uncle who falls asleep on the couch before dessert, snoring loudly?
Honestly, I can’t remember anything I saw that day. I could never find that field again (though I do have a picture of it somewhere.) But I’ll never forget that glorious I-don’t-have-a-schedule feeling. Of course that was long before responsibilities – like children and jobs — curtailed my freewheeling travel style.
The next time the kids give you a hard time on vacation, remind yourself that you really are building memories to last a lifetime. Just ask Sheila Dennis. She was a wide-eyed 9-year-old when her parents took her to see the world-famous Rockettes perform at Radio City Music Hall in New York. It was her first trip outside Texas. “I loved the glitter and the color,” she said. “I was thrilled.”
As I fought my way through the crowds to inch closer to Rockefeller Center I wondered to myself why anybody would venture into Midtown Manhattan for the annual tree lighting, yet every year they come.
I’m lost! Hopelessly, completely lost on a winding, backcountry road somewhere in Westchester County, N.Y. Did I mention it was night and pitch-black? “How could you do this?” asks my aggravated 16-year-old daughter, Mel.
[et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text] By Eileen Ogintz Tribune Media Services Three hundred and 40. That’s how many steps and ladder rungs we climb to Bandelier National Monument…
ALONG INTERSTATE 95 HEADING SOUTH —: “PLEEZE make the radio louder!”
“Turn off the radio and put on a CD!”
“Not THAT CD!”
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