Hundreds and hundreds of incredibly colorful balloons, cheering spectators and the sun rising over the Sandia Mountains and pink desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It’s Balloon Fiesta, a spectacular event.
My Internet connection will be rather spotty for the next few days, but I had to find some WiFi and upload a couple of photos for you.
Technorati tags: travel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Balloon Fiesta, ballooning
Now that I’ve been blogging here for well over a year, I’ve built up a nice little archive. It’s fun to go back in there, shove things aside and poke around.
I wrote a post last October that rings true today: Slow Travel & Getting Local This Fall.
It’s easy to get into too much of a rush to “pack it all in” when we travel, and one way to avoid that is to get out there and investigate your own backyard.
Draw a two-hour-drive circle around your hometown and see what falls into it, then load up the family and head for that place that you’ve always meant to visit.
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I’ll be the first to say that you don’t have to buy a bunch of stuff to “get organized.”
My organization mantra is the old one, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” If you can’t figure out where to put it, consider whether you need it at all.
Don’t despair if you’re not at this point; it’s an ongoing process to corral mess. You should see my kitchen right now.
Still, a few nice gew-gaws like matching storage boxes or nice containers can go a long way to making you feel tidier (assuming your stuff actually gets sorted and goes into the pretty boxes!)
One shop where I find clutter control is in The Container Store. They have a Travel Sale around May of every year, but you can peruse their travel-related storage offerings anytime at their stores or on their Web site.
I like their “tips” section on things to help keep your gear stowed in your car, Get Your Vehicle on the Road to Organization. The map case seems rather silly — just stack them neatly in the driver’s side door pocket, for heaven’s sake — but I do recommend a trunk organizer for all the crapola that rolls around back there.
There’s a store section called Travel, with luggage and little refillable bottles and those suitcase envelopes for your clothes to go into (which I don’t understand the need for, but OK….)
Want something a little more hip for organizing your travel gear? Try Flight 001; they have all sorts of cool packing stuff that makes you feel very jetstreamed, but check the prices before you buy.
Come on, $38 for shoe bags?
(Note: The Container Store and Flight 001 did not provide products or request this review; I just like them.)
Technorati tags: travel, family travel, get organized
Planning on travel over Thanksgiving?
You may decide to drive, take the train, cycle or even walk after seeing this video made by a passenger on Delta flight 6499. He was stuck on the JFK airport tarmac for seven hours, with conflicting updates and no food.
To see it on YouTube, click here.
Note the ubiquitous sound of crying children in background audio — yep, that could be you, Mom and Dad! Oh boy….
Big hat tip to Budget Travel’s This Just In for showing this video in their post the passengers strike back.
One of my favorite personal finance bloggers, Free Money Finance, just posted up with How to Have a Great Trip to Disney World While Saving Tons of Money and Time.
Useful stuff.
For more detail, there’s my Family Travel series on surviving WDW — start with the Intro.
Update: This just in from Frommers, seven agencies to help your family rent a place to stay in Orlando.
Welcome to Banned Books Week; even if some think it’s hype, I think it’s worthy of note.
How about some literary travel in honor of the occasion?
It’s sometimes easier to appreciate a writer in his or her home, not just from reading their works. Here is a list of U.S. author-related places where you can take your kids:
** Helen Keller. Although she wrote The Story of My Life, this deaf and blind writer is perhaps best known from the play and movie The Miracle Worker.
Visit Ivy Green, her home in Tuscumbia, Alabama (the northwest part of the state) and see the famous water pump where teacher Annie Sullivan taught Helen to spell W-A-T-E-R and achieved a communications breakthrough.
** Mark Twain. His novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn often makes the Banned Book List, but Faulkner called him “the father of American literature.” Visit his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, the setting for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or his beautiful Victorian home in Hartford, Connecticut, where he wrote several of his classics.
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** Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Yearling and Cross Creek lived in her north central Florida Cracker farmhouse near Gainesville for 25 years; today it’s a National Historic Landmark and a Florida State Park, preserved as it was in the 1930s.
On the back porch where she typed, it looks as though she’s just stepped away for a moment to tend to her orange grove.
** John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Cannery Row; no wonder the guy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Take your family to The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California (south of San Francisco.) It’s only 17 miles from beautiful Monterey, where they’ve spiffed up Cannery Row and you can also visit the spectacular Monterey Aquarium.
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** Laura Ingalls Wilder. My daughter and I visited the site of the original Little House on the Prairie near Independence, Kansas; a little one-room cabin has been reconstructed using traditional materials, and Pa’s hand-dug well is still there. Dr. Tann, who saved the family from malaria, is buried in Independence.
You can also see the Ingalls home in De Smet, South Dakota (featured in Little Town on the Prairie) and the house on Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder wrote the series of books that probably best capture the life of an American pioneer family.
Did I miss any great places? Tell me in the comments!
Technorati tags: travel, family travel, children’s literature, literary travel
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Some posts from Family Travel have been featured in different blog carnivals around the Web, and I found some gems for you:
** At the Carnival of Family Life hosted by the Real Life blog, readers can find my post that asks, “Are there times when it’s not a good idea to take kids to certain dangerous events like the rodeo, or an air show?” Let’s talk about when bad things happen to good travel.
My post on nursing is best for the traveling baby was also on the Carnival of Family Life hosted the previous week by Mom on Wheels.
Other Family Life carnival posts I liked included one from a Melbourne Mom who went to Showtime, apparently the Aussie equivalent of our US state fair. They ate Pluto Pups, cream polly waffles and fairy floss. What?!
Vicky has some great tips for traveling with kids in London.
Ben Cotten says that men are like cats, especially when Mom leaves town and Dad has a corn dog supply.
** I’m always glad when I can send in a post to the Rock and Roll carnival, since it’s an interesting mix of music-related writing. This month they featured my D.A.R.E. to stay at these hotels post on drug-related family travel (yes, there is such a thing, I think I invented it. Way too much coffee….)
Also check out popular music in India and new trends in Bollymusic. Are you a musician? Review the top 8 things that unsigned/independent artists do wrong.
** The Carnival of Cities featured my post from the Perceptive Travel blog about finding plastic food in Tokyo.
There were also some great travel-related posts about Epcot in Orlando’s Walt Disney World, a Myanmar/Burma update and the “Hairy Swede” talks about Stockholm, Sweden.
** The Carnival of Wheels at GarageBlog included my interview with drag racing star Ashley Force on The Driving Woman. In a few weeks, look for a full Ashley Force profile on the Edmunds.com Web site section called Women and Family Car Guide.
Technorati tags: travel, family travel, blog carnival, blogging
Blogtipping is a little online custom from Easton Ellsworth of the Business Blogwire; a nice way of highlighting blog discoveries on the first of the month.
I’ve found three interesting blogs in my recent wanderings:
** Big in Japan. This is one of several blogs on the Gadling travel site (you’ll also find Leif Pettersen’s scathingly funny My Bloody Romania there) but I’m drawn to these posts by Matthew Firestone because I lived in Japan.
He really nails the many quirks that you might miss if you just zip through as a tourist — the weird TV shows, the very NOT staid Japanese getting down at Gas Panic in Tokyo and yummy food like shabu-shabu.
** Amish America. I found this blog while researching an upcoming travel article on the Amish in Jamesport, Missouri. Amish America is written by Erik Wesner, who spends time in Amish communities when he’s not living in Krakow, Poland (what an interesting guy!) His site is incredibly comprehensive and covers the Amish world from Pennsylvania to Oregon. I loved his post about playing softball with the kids at an Amish school.
** Europe String. This blog is written by Melissa Atienza-Petri and features travel in Europe on a shoestring budget. It’s part of the b5media Travel and Culture channel of blogs. Recent Europe String posts include tourist traps in Verona and festive White Nights events.
I don’t quite follow Easton’s blogtipping methodology, but I’m always excited when I get my act together and remember that it’s the first of the month, and time to spread that link love.
Technorati tags: travel, family travel, blogtipping, blogging, travel blogging