We have a winner of the Travels with Baby guidebook by Shelly Rivoli.
The Coin Flipper at Random.org picked commenter Sheril as the winner of the book, so I’ll be mailing it off to her.
Congratulations, Sheril!
Categories
Month: March 2009
If you’re planning a family vacation right now, you might wonder what I’d suggest for the best places to take the kids to the beach.
Everyone has different criteria for an awesome beach. My perfect seashore has warm water, protected/calmer areas for babies and toddlers, enough wave action to keep experienced swimmers busy on a boogie board, family-friendly entertainment and decent food nearby.
I don’t mind a little commercial development if it’s not too grotesque, and it would be nice if there were safe, fun places (like a boardwalk) for a preteen or teen to hang out when not on the sand.
Here is where I would take my children if I was feeling beachy:
*** Florida’s Gulf Coast — Once you’ve been spoiled by Florida beaches, it’s hard to put up with grungy sand or chilly water elsewhere. The Atlantic coast of the Sunshine State has pretty good choices in Daytona, Cocoa Beach and Jacksonville/St. Augustine, but my vote goes to the Gulf Coast because the water’s warmer, the sand is usually nicer and the wave action is gentler for younger kids.
Try Clearwater/St. Pete for lively urban beaches, nearby Caladesi Island State Park for isolated beauty, or Siesta Key near Sarasota, an all-around winner. (Alternative: The northwest Florida Panhandle for even better sand and clear, warm water but sometimes a bit too much tacky commercialization.)
*** San Diego — Southern California is known for its surfside culture, and it’s a well-deserved reputation. My only gripe is that the water is too dang cold for me and the wave action can be frightening for younger swimmers. Still, Coronado Island near sunshine-filled San Diego has some of my favorite, most pristine and kid-friendly beaches. (Alternative: Santa Monica, near Los Angeles; it is tough to beat that famous pier.)
*** Maine — I’m almost ready to forgive the cold water simply because of the charm and natural beauty of Maine islands and coastal villages. Make no mistake, the beaches are generally pebbly and rocky (the southern coast does have sand) and your best bet to avoid freezing may be to dabble around looking for critters in tidepools, but there’s no doubt that it’s a perfect world when you spend crisp summer days Down East.
Make your kids try a lobster roll, and then eat theirs if they’re so foolish as to dislike it! (Alternative: Misquamicut Beach in that small state with a big heart, Rhode Island.)
*** North Carolina’s Outer Banks — Miles of barrier island coastline, some very remote and beautiful (Cape Hatteras National Seashore, with the famous swirly black-and-white lighthouse) and others teeming with cheesy beachside overbuilding (translation – plenty of miniature golf places for kids) means that you can probably find just the right affordable spot for your beach towel on the Outer Banks.
Kids adore the creations from Kitty Hawk Kites, too; buy, then step out the door and fly ’em. Don’t miss the founding-of-America history at the Lost Colony, and the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. (Alternative: Go north to Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is OK but a little grubby and somewhat too raucous for younger ones.)
*** Hawaii — Too many people only consider travel to Oahu and Waikiki, but there is an island and a beach (or two!) to suit every family. Cast a wide net in your Hawaiian vacation planning.
Hanauma Bay on Oahu is noted for snorkeling opportunities, and Kailua Beach Park is nice as well. The Oahu North Shore is dramatic, but waves can be dangerous in winter. Kauai is particularly lush and tropical (try Hanalei Beach, Poipu Beach Park or Kekaha Beach Park.) The Kona Coast on aptly-named Big Island is full of kid-friendly resorts. (Alternative: There IS no better alternative! The islands have plenty of variety to suit every age and disposition.)
That’s my beach roundup; hope you found it helpful.
I’m not as familiar with the Great Lakes but don’t want to leave my Midwest readers out, so if you have suggestions for beaches there or anywhere else in the US, please tell us in the comments below.
Even though it has been a few years since my kids were babies and toddlers, I have no problem remembering what a challenge it was to take them on family road trips, or to travel on airplanes while lugging a diaper bag, car seat, Cheerios dispenser and those squirty juice boxes.
If my Mom memory fails me, I can get right back up to speed with Shelly Rivoli’s excellent book, Travels with Baby: The Ultimate Guide for Planning Trips with Babies, Toddlers, and Preschool-Age Children.
The San Francisco Bay Area-based Ms. Rivoli is an experienced traveler and mother of three (welcome to her new baby Theo, born this month!) She’s active on Twitter and also blogs about her latest thoughts and advice on travel with young ones.
Here are some highlights from Shelly’s book:
*** Detailed pre-trip planning tips, including “Fifteen Things You Might Not Think to Pack” (yes, an inflatable beach ball is a total what-to-play-with lifesaver!)
*** Honest feedback about the relative ease of traveling with infants, who mostly just want to be carried and nursed, and have a clean diaper on their bottom. With a good carrier, you are free to walk around and do adult-ish things like shopping while baby snoozes, or those curious little eyes peek out from the sling to take in the sights. In a few short months, they will be running all around getting into things, and the infant days will seem like a piece of cake.
*** Lots of helpful guidance about international travel, including food and water safety, vaccinations and “bringing the ugly Winnie the Pooh diaper bag” so that its contents are obvious and it’s less likely to be swiped. On Shelly’s blog, one of her latest entries is about flying to India with a 2-year-old. I like her sense of adventure.
*** She has a whole chapter on taking a cruise with young children; which seems like a no-brainer good idea but can have a number of unexpected pitfalls, as Condé Nast Traveler‘s Wendy Perrin will tell you. I also like Shelly’s extensive section on train travel (such as it is in the US.)
If all this sounds like your kind of book, here’s what to do to win my copy:
*** Leave a brief comment below about why you’d like to read “Travels with Baby”.
*** At the end of this week, on Friday, March 27, 2009, I will randomly pick one of your comments using one of the cool tools on Random.org, then I’ll announce the winner in a separate post.
*** If you win, I’ll email you at the address you leave when you comment (to get your snail mail address,) then I’ll box up the book and send it to you. Yes, I’ll mail to places outside the US.
Thanks for participating, and thanks very much to Shelly for sending me a review copy.
Good luck!
The room was packed as Pam Mandel and I launched our Blog Highways: Travel Blogging for the Wanderer panel at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference here in Austin.
For Twitter-networked folks, the hashtag was #sxswtravel and the live-tweets were flying from Shannon (@Cajun_Mama) of the Traveling Mamas and Kelly (@kag2u) from Travellious, to name just two.
Thanks also to the biceps/triceps of Canadian travel and tourism marketing expert Todd Lucier, who streamed the panel live to the Web as it happened, using Qik from his cell phone (see Part One video of the panel and Part Two video.) I’ve shot video from a Flip Ultra, and your arms start to ache holding the camera extra-steady, so I appreciate Todd’s hanging in there for an entire hour.
UpTake’s Elliott Ng attended and wrote a summary post on the UpTake Travel Industry blog; thanks also to writer Laura Moncur and the Austin American-Statesman for their coverage. My co-panelist Pam had her own insights on the panel.
Since others summarized the meat of the panel topics and discussions, here are some of my Big Picture thoughts:
*** Ensure that your audience is comfortable and involved, both in the room and out. Pam and I scoped out the panel room ahead of time and rearranged everything to bring in more chairs and move a table. We knew there would be floor-sitters, but we tried to ensure that they had good sightlines. We arranged in advance for people to live-tweet and live-stream, to serve those watching in other timezones around the world. Details matter if you want to step up and bring your A-Game as a speaker.
*** Try to have info nuggets for both newbies and experienced people. Pam discussed basic blog design issues like “yellow on black background is NOT readable,” because she still sees things like that all the time as the Travel Editor at BlogHer. It’s apparently not too “basic” for some out there. I spoke briefly about using Utterli to make audio blog posts from your cell phone (for bloggers who are ready to move beyond icky yellow font conundrums.)
*** Experts in the audience enrich the discussion, but speakers must always keep the discussion on track. We’ve all seen conference panels hijacked by big mouths “asking questions” when they’re really making rambling statements. As a yakky, opinionated person myself, I have an inner “Shut up, Sheila!” button that I often poke at conferences. We did NOT have that problem at all; in fact Todd Lucier and Matthew Cashmore of Lonely Planet had super-valuable advice in response to a couple of specific questions from our audience. Don’t be threatened by experts if you’re a speaker; they can enrich your content immeasurably as long as they’re on topic (plus, Cashmore later showed me the new Lonely Planet iPhone app — how cool is that?!)
*** I need to do a better job of creating content on the fly during events/conferences. This post should have gone up days ago; I’m too slow. Every travel blogger has his/her own style – I edit carefully and need quiet time to write full posts, so I need to learn to create other types of content that I can post rapidly without obsessing. Twitter is perfect for me and I use it, but with some concentrated effort I could toss up more photo posts, more to Flickr and TwitPic, more to Facebook, etc. This blog basically went dormant for a week, which is unacceptable to me. The total irony is that my main SXSWi presentation was about how to find maximum blog post material in a short period of travel time, by “thinking like a blogger.” I’m great at finding the material, but not efficient enough in quickly producing timely content from my thoughts.
*** Grab good ideas and go with them despite the extra work, i.e. our travel swag bag at the panel. Pam and I pulled together and bagged up a bunch of travel-related gifts and goodies for the first 45 Blog Highways attendees (I’ll be writing about the bag contents in more detail soon on UpTake’s Travel Industry blog.) It seems to have gone over well, and the surprise added excitement and buzz to our presentation, so it was worth running around town getting things and navigating the tons of stuff piled up in my living room.
I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to present at SXSWi, collaborate with Pam and meet so many other travel enthusiasts, both in person and online. Thank you for the encouragement and support.
There are other travel blogging panels coming up in 2009 – Travel Bloggers as Boundary-Breaking Evangelists on Saturday, July 25 at the sold-out BlogHer conference in Chicago, the Travel Blog Exchange meetup in Chicago on July 26, a travel track has been added to Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas October 2009 and Travel Blog Camp in London, on November 10 and hosted by the UK’s Darren Cronian of Travel Rants.
This Three Stooges sign is on the door to my guest room.
I’m running around cleaning it (and the rest of the house) because Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference starts this Friday, March 13.
As a resident of the Austin metro area and a traveling guest-room-borrower myself, I’m happy to host fellow geeks at this event.
This year’s guests include social media communicator extraordinaire Liz Strauss and the multi-talented Becky McCray, who specializes in small businesses in small towns and rural areas.
On Saturday, March 14, I’ll be speaking at SXSWi about travel blogging (our panel is called Blog Highways: Travel Blogging for the Wanderer) with Seattle-based writer and photographer Pam Mandel.
We intend to pack our panel room in the Austin Convention Center….but first, Hotel Knucklehead has sheets to wash and vacuuming to do!
Have you noticed that my family hasn’t traveled anywhere lately? Yeah, we’ve noticed too. 🙁
I’m moderately sulky about it, but I’m determined to fill in the void by exploring my own backyard, in Austin and Central Texas.
We ran around downtown last weekend trying to get to the annual Kite Festival in Austin’s Zilker Park, but the traffic and parking were too crazy (it was a gorgeous, perfectly windy day, too.)
We decided to drown our sorrows with some Crush’ns at Amy’s Ice Creams, an Austin institution since 1984. My son had M&Ms crushed into Vanilla Bean ice cream, and Sainted Husband and I had Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups crushed into Belgian Chocolate ice cream (for me) and Dark Chocolate (for him.)
Amy’s doesn’t use a cold mixing board like Marble Slab or Cold Stone Creamery – they claim a room temperature board does a better job of bringing out the flavors. Their zany, joking staff brings out the laughter, even when the customer line snakes out the door, as it did when we visited.
We love Amy’s!