Category: Tips

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Tips

The Christmas ornaments are coming out

Cape Hatteras NC lighthouse Christmas ornament (photo by Sheila Scarborough)It’s that time of year – when we pull out boxes o’ holiday stuff and try to figure out where it’s all going to go amongst all of the other stuff that’s already out.

(Still, it’s a nice problem to have.  Some folks don’t have homes at all….learn how to help from the incredible Mark Horvath and InvisiblePeople.TV.)

Meantime, the fresh-cut tree from Elgin Christmas Tree Farm is sitting on the porch in a bucket.  I know, that’s pretty lame since we brought it home on Saturday.

My daughter is now home from college to help decorate it, too, which my son is very excited about!

We may go as a family to see the new Harry Potter movie together, since we’re all fans.  It is nice that my son is old enough now to see more mature movies so we can see something besides kiddie stuff.

Meantime, from my archives, here is a Flickr photo slideshow of our Christmas ornaments from around the world (US ornaments and international ornaments.)

Pardon me while I go find more of those little hangars that the vacuum cleaner will be sucking up until July….

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Tips

Gifts for the active parents

I must admit that the hardest thing for me to do is buy gifts for my girlfriends who are also mothers. Since I have yet to experience this joy, I’m not exactly good at choosing anything for them. Let’s just say, I just gave “Bamby” (illustrated) to a friend of mine whois girl is at kindergarten and a book about parenting to my best friend, who’s boy is 8. Not exactly the best choices, eh?

Oh and should I mention the time when I made a total fool of myself asking my best friend “you actually traveled with your boy when he was a baby?” Guilty!

So, dear friends, who need to buy gifts for those who are parents…first of all, do a little research about traveling with kids . It’s not a nightmare – but it surely can turn into one, and easily! – and it’s different than backpacking solo around Europe.

If you’ve got new parents in your group of friends, choose among these travel gifts for new parents . They will be happy that you’ve considered their new status and their love for travel. The stroller and car seat combo is an excellent gift, by the way. And slip a copy of the Rough Guide to Travel with Babies and Young Children in the gift bag as well.

Or, you can look up some family travel deals and get some vouchers for your friends. Sure, I bet the moms will love a week away from …everything, at one point or another (shhh, this is something I’ve learned from my friends but promised never to talk about it).

Photo credit

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Tips

What do I always pack on a trip?

Gobelins Art Belgian tapestry bags (photo by Sheila Scarborough)When it’s time to get it all into a carryon suitcase, I travel light….but when it’s time for a road trip in our minivan, I pack everything but snowshoes.

What goes with me every time?  I just wrote a guest post about that on Practical Travel Gear.

Here’s the first item:

1.  Tapestry bags for jewelry

I picked up two Gobelins Art tapestry bags in Belgium because, hey, that plus lace and chocolate is what you buy in Belgium!

One is small and zippered and takes a few necklaces, pins and spare watches (a Timex and Swatch that look fancier than they are) and the other is actually a snap-closure coin purse that I use for earrings.

It keeps those small, frisky gold studs from wandering off and having parties with the missing socks from my dryer.

Want to know more?

Click here for the rest of the 5 Things I Always Pack.

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Site reviews Tips

A few more Priceline tips

I’ve written before about our experience with Priceline…here’s a quick refresher on our takeaways from that search for a Las Vegas hotel room for a business trip….

  • Hotel rooms and other purchases from travel auction sites are generally nonrefundable.
  • Be prepared for a walk or dealing with transportation if you get a hotel on the far edges of your desired region.  If you have kids, ensure that they can handle a walk on crowded city streets.
  • For the best “bang for the buck,” bid on fairly high-level properties [3.5 – 4 stars.] It doesn’t make sense to get a room at a Days Inn or Motel 6 through Priceline.
  • Be flexible. My husband requested a King room but found when he checked in that they were out of King rooms that were non-smoking. He was fine with a room with two Queens.

This time, we needed a hotel room on a Sunday night in north Dallas.

As I’ve said before in my post on how to find the best hotel deals, Sunday is a great time to score a cheap room because the weekend traffic is gone and many business travelers aren’t there yet, so rooms stand empty and hotels are ready to deal.

Sunday night in an area (north Dallas) with a TON of big chain hotels (lots of competition to fill rooms) is prime territory for a Priceline score when you aren’t particularly picky about exact hotel or precise location.

It worked: we bid $50 for a four-star hotel and got the Hyatt North Dallas, normally around $170/night and up.

My son is cavorting in the pool as I type this.  He does not really care that this is a business/conference hotel. A pool is a pool. 🙂

Thank you, Priceline.

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Blog Product Reviews Texas Tips USA

Gowalla and Foursquare lead traveler to House of Pies

Slice of Bayou Goo pie from Houston's House of Pies (photo by Sheila Scarborough)In my tourism training hat, people often ask me about the utility of location-based services like Gowalla and Foursquare.

Here’s an example of why they’re so handy….

I was speaking in Houston at the TFEA (Texas Festivals and Events Association) annual conference, and I needed a quick meal near the hotel.  It was a rather ritzy area – at one point I tweeted, “I’m looking for a Taco Bell in a Smith and Wollensky part of town” – but I did find a sandwich joint where I could run in and out and get something to go.

While parked, I checked in on both Gowalla and Foursquare, because I’m experimenting with them for my tourism-related clients. Both services use the GPS function on my T-Mobile Android smartphone to figure out where I am, and then show me nearby places that are listed in their database.

Both kept showing a nearby House of Pies.

Who wouldn’t want pie after a long drive and before a big speaking gig the next day?  Who has kids and spouses who like pie?

I rest my case.

Without the digital insights from Gowalla and Foursquare (and Yelp if I had launched that app, which also has a location-based function and checkins) I would not have noticed the neon-lit House of Pies building diagonally across the parking lot from me on Westheimer, a major Houston thoroughfare. There’s also a House of Pies on Houston’s Kirby Drive and they’re on Twitter as @HouseofPies1967.

One slice of their house specialty later, I was a fan of their Bayou Goo pie (a “pecan crust with a layer of sweet cream cheese, then a layer of vanilla custard swirled with chocolate chunks and topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings”) and even more of a fan of location-based services that bring me the information I need, when I need it, where I am located.

It’s hard to beat that convenience at 9 pm in an unfamiliar city, I’ll tell you!

Take a close look at privacy and notification settings before you use these; the default setting tends to be a public broadcasting of your location via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and you need to think through those implications. You can choose not to inform anyone when you check in, of course; Foursquare calls it “off the grid.”

If you have a smartphone, consider getting one of these free travel apps – I’m partial to Gowalla because it has a scavenger hunt aspect that kids will like, and lots of cool Trips for travel ideas. For more insights, here’s Gary Arndt’s post Gowalla vs Foursquare as tools for travel.

These services can really help with the “what’s around here?” question as you travel.

(This post was included in the 21 July edition of Wanderfood Wednesday. Check it out for other foodie posts!)

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Tips

Is a hostel any place for a family? Sometimes, it sure is!

If you’ve dismissed hostels as exclusively for the single, young, party-hearty sort, you may wish to reconsider.

Some hostels have private rooms for families, rather than the dorm-style accommodations that singles use, and you sure can’t beat the price.

I’m going to start poking my head into hostels when I travel, to check them out on the Kid-Friendly Scale, but meantime here’s a great BootsnAll article by Jennifer Miller:

Hosteling with Kids: Benefits and Tips.

Why hostels?  From Jennifer’s article:

“Finding lodging for families while traveling can be a real challenge. The more children you have, the bigger the challenge and the more expensive it gets. If you’ve got kids and you haven’t tried hosteling with them, give it a try; it’s fun, it’s easy and there are lots of benefits over the traditional hotel stay. Among them, it’s generally cheaper. At $15-20 a bed per night our family of six can stay for an average of $100 a night in a hostel. Try finding two hotel rooms that adjoin for that price!”

Let us know about your own hostel experiences in the comments: recommended places, and places that may seem family-friendly but don’t work out so well in reality.

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Product Reviews Site reviews Tips

Finding the best iPhone and iPad apps for kids

Best Kids Apps logo (courtesy BestKidsApps)I know, I know….the kids should simply “look out the window at the scenery” on trips….like we did, right?

(Did you cringe the first time that phrase came out of your mouth as a parent?  Did you think, OMG what Old Geezer thing will I say next – “We walked five miles to school through the snow, barefoot, going uphill.”)

As usual, I digress….

Many parents of young children are finding that games and apps (applications) on their iPhone or new iPad are ideal for keeping certain squirmy family members quiet and amused, especially during long trips.

I’ve found a marvelous resource for you:  while participating in the This Week in Travel podcast (go here for our episode – Spirit Air and Ryanair compete to suck the most) I chatted with co-host Jen Leo about her experiences traveling with her first child, daughter Cora.

Jen told me about a site that she runs with Jamie Pearson, called Best Kids Apps – “we play all the iPhone games so you don’t have to.”  Yay!

App games are broken out by age group and by type (Educational, Creative, Just for Fun, etc.)  There’s just a ton of helpful info there for you app-collectors.

More good news: they have a post up on the best iPad apps for kids, AND they’re giving away an iPad for Mother’s Day (details to follow.)

Want to see a how a kid who has grown up in a touchscreen world reacts to the iPad?  Pretty interesting stuff in the video below from Todd Lapin on Laughing Squid; here’s his blog post about this “UI (User Interface) experiment” – A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

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Tips

Listen up! iPod and audio travel guides and tours

An iPod toddler (courtesy GoonSquadSarah at Flickr CC)Are your kids like mine – often with some sort of headphone or earbud plugged into their aural sockets?  Take advantage of that tendency by looking for available iPod/audio guides and tours when you travel.  Kids can keep looking plugged-in and “cool” but may actually learn something on your trip.

As a parent, of course, your job is to never seem too “Squeeee!” happy when they occasionally admit that something is informative or educational.

Where do you find these tours?

First, if you use iPods, do a search in the iTunes store; Apple recognizes the value of their audio tour podcasts although the iTunes Search function is not particularly good.

There are many well-established general travel podcasts (think of them as little radio shows) from Indie Travel Podcast (latest topics as of this writing include Christchurch, New Zealand and Tasmania) the Amateur Traveler (latest episodes are about the Republic of Georgia, London and Easter Island) Frommers.com and Rick Steves who covers Europe.  An iTunes search for Disney informational podcasts returns a bunch of options too; just make sure they’re fairly recent since things can change quickly at the parks.

You can also find location-specific offerings on iTunes like LAWithKids for Los Angeles and audio/video podcast offerings from VisitLondon.com.

Some companies focus specifically on audio offerings – AudioSnacks, for example, has a big section for audio tours, and the company SoundWalk has some very unique walking tours that place special emphasis on New York City, although they do have a few other cities as well. The media company ARTineraries has professionally-produced tours of mostly Italian historic sites.  LearnOutLoud has a kid’s audio section, too.

The UK’s Guardian, always a good source of worldwide travel information, has a small selection of free audio tours called Sounds of the City (Athens, Rome, Nice, Marseille, Valencia and Granada) plus an eclectic collection of very personalized audio travel guides, featuring people like musician Franz Ferdinand taking you on a tour of his hometown of Glasgow.

Some travel guide companies also produce audio – I like the DK (Dorling-Kindersley) Eyewitness guides for their clean layout and liberal use of photos and graphics, so I was pleased to find that they also have a few DK Travel podcasts.

Finding these things is a classic Google search problem, but I’ve had best results when I query search engines about tours for a specific location.  As I always advise, start with the tourism board/Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) for the place you’re going to visit.  For example, the Chicago Office of Tourism has free downloadable guides including Chicago for Kids and a blues tour narrated by Buddy Guy.  Even smaller towns may have them; Astoria and Warrenton, Oregon have audio tours guided by locals and sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce.

Don’t forget that most museums have had audio tours for a long time, including big places like Chicago’s Field Museum and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, plus smaller ones like the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, which has tours in English and Spanish.

Let us know in the comments if you have any favorites!

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Europe Tips USA

Looking back at Dr Pepper, the Little House and London Calling

I love poking around in my archive attic, especially with this blog’s 4th Anniversary coming up in February 2010….

A year ago on the Family Travel Guide, we had fun talking about:

***  Sugar overload at the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, TX

***  Nautical fun in Norfolk, VA

***  Some TSA tips for dealing with kids through airport security

Want to go back further?

In December 2007, we looked at:

***  Cool US museums you’ve never heard of (brief summary plus link to an article I did for Education.com)

***  Holidays with kids in New York City

***  Whether the airlines should provide harnesses for kids

***  A reminder to make travel plans to see March Madness games

***  One of my very first videos (eek!) of the site of the original Little House on the Prairie in Independence, KS

Even further?

In December 2006:

***  Support your parks and pay a visit (based on an overnight at the CCC-built cabins in Bastrop State Park, TX)

***  Tips and advice when it’s London Calling (with one of my favorite photos of my daughter when we visited)

***  Me as a non-skier kvetching about constant travel articles about skiing this time of year

Thanks for wandering down memory lane with me!

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Philosophy Tips

Travel now, before your teen says “buzz off”

She'll go to pick him up from summer camp, but long haul travel? Naaah. (photo by Sheila Scarborough)I love my kids, but there is a 7-year age difference between my 17-year-old and my 10-year-old, and that makes all of that family bonding a little rough (I had each child on Navy shore duty assignments, and there was a 7 year stretch at sea between pregnancies. Kinda into planning….that’s me.)

Right now, they have little in common.

When I get all excited with the maps and ready to plan excursions, my teen daughter is less than interested in my favorite ideas for long-haul road trips with her brother in the van.

“Less than interested” meaning “violently objects to.”

Here’s the thing: she now has a life outside of her immediate family. Friends. Buddies. Other plans. A driver’s license.

So, when it’s time for Thanksgiving break or the December holiday break or Spring Break, she wants to see her best girl pal coming home from a grueling stint at West Point, or hang out with other friends, not drive with us to West Texas for a visit to Fort Davis and a McDonald Observatory star party (the latest road trip on my wish list.)

We’ll still drag her out periodically, and she loves to travel given the right circumstances, but the tail-wagging days of enthusiasm are over (until a few more years pass, and then suddenly the Parental Units are cool again – you know how that is.)

Moral of the story:  travel a ton when they’re younger, before they decide that their own peer group is infinitely more appealing than long trips with squawky brothers and parents in a minivan.