Posted by Miss Maccy on Mar 20, 2009 in
Travel with kids I’ve been doing a bit of research on how to make a gazillion dollars by blogging and I’ve found the most amazing blogging secret! Except it isn’t really a secret because obviously I found it and now I’m telling you. But I digress, apparently the secret is to have…
an imaginary baby!
It must be working for Jessica/Lola because she has been able to upgrade her blog to three columns. Something worth thinking about, no?
Of course, I already have three actual children and I’m not sure how they would adjust to having an imaginary baby. There could be a lot of issues there. On the other hand, one thing about children is that when somebody has something, they all have to have it. I’m not so sure we could travel with say four imaginary babies – and there’s always the possibility of twins. I hear airlines now carry a limited amount of baby food and nappies. Things could get nasty if we run out of supplies mid-flight.
Still, I bet there aren’t many family travel blogs out there that deal with the perils of travelling with imaginary babies.
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Tags: Baby, Baby food, Blog, Children
Posted by Miss Maccy on Feb 27, 2009 in
Travel with kids WARNING: DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO SELL ALL YOUR POSSESSIONS, POSSIBLY YOUR LEFT KIDNEY, AND CONSIDER RETIREMENT PLANS TO BE SO LAST MILLENNIUM.
[amtap amazon:asin=1906098034]
Yesterday I discovered this book at one of our local libraries and nearly od’ed on the excitement of it. The library must have accidentally ordered the book before the recession was official or something. The author, William Gray, writes for the UK magazine Wanderlust. After reading this book I have a serious case of wanderlust myself.
Peaks of Greatness:
- Will (as I now like to refer to him) has travelled with twins and has lived to tell the tale, which he tells honestly.
- He has great sections on general travel tips and then specific tips for each of the categories of babies/toddlers, children and teens.
- The main part of the book is divided up geographically and covers the whole planet (woo-hoo). Each geographical section contains highlights and kid friendly attractions for different age groups. Unlike a backpacking guide book which might assume you can spend three months in one suburb of outer Mongolia, Will goes for the jugular in each location. Along with family friendly accommodation, tour operators and food recommendations, he has included bonus nuggets of information such as suggested books to read and DVD’s to watch.
- It’s colourful, it’s glossy. It can be read in bite sized chunks which is helpful for sleep deprived parents and those with post-pregnancy brain.
Valleys of Despair:
- It is ad supported. Not offensive and very relevant travel ads (and not many of them) but it does “magizinify” the experience. However, if that is the difference between having a super fabulous travel book or not, I can live with the ads.
- Egypt. I get it. It’s fantastic and educational and incredible and we are not going there. So don’t rub it in already.
- Carbon offsetting. See “Egypt” above.
Overall this is a fabulous book packed full of great advice. I’m finding it particularly useful because we only have a week in each of the major cities, so it’s great to see suggested itineraries suitable for kids and families. EVERY library should have a copy.
Tags: Carbon offset, DVD, Egypt, guide book, Library, Travel with kids, UK, United Kingdom, wanderlust, William Gray
Posted by Miss Maccy on Feb 26, 2009 in
Travel with kids,
UK
- Image by 5500 via Flickr
Tintin Shop in London: Travel Savvy Mom.
Now here is a very interesting dilema. I can’t decide if this is a really, really, good idea or a really, really bad one. I suspect my kids would happily spend their life savings in this shop. It’s the same kind of feeling that I have about Hamley’s toy store. Although I could probably be persuaded to buy more Tintin stuff than plastic fantastic.
The Tintin Shop Online
View Larger Map
If you can’t make it to London, you can check here to find yourself a piece of Tintin love.
Tintin Shops Directory by Tintinologists
Tags: London, Shopping with Kids, Tintin
Posted by Miss Maccy on Feb 25, 2009 in
Italy,
Travel with kids 
Italiakids.com : Italy with Kids – Home.
Here’s a great site with family friendly hotels in Florence, Rome and Milan. Loads of other useful activities like the usual Museums and restaurants but also kid specific things like playgrounds and party planning! Now that is cooking with gas! One of our kids will be celebrating his birthday while we are overseas. It’s bad enough trying to plan a birthday at home let alone in a completely new city.
Tags: Birthday, Florence, Italy, Milan, Party, Rome
Posted by Miss Maccy on Feb 21, 2009 in
Travel with kids There’s no shortage of wonderful travel sites out there, but there are also a plethora of them that totally fail to live up to their own hype. You know the ones – you think you’re going to find great world wide accommodation deals, only to discover they cover a whole three states in the USA. Or they have loads of wonderful places – it’s just that the site is written in ancient Polish.
Yesterday thanks to Mashable I discovered a fabulous, fabulous site that focused on vacation / holiday rental properties world wide. Vacation rental properties are one of the key ways to have an affordable family holiday, and this fabulous site delivers in buckets. You can search by name or drill down on a map. It’s fast, it’s slick, it’s… it’s… fabulous.
Not perhaps the world’s most memorable site name, make sure you bookmark Otalo for planning your next vacation. I love the fact that it starts your breadcrumb trail with “Earth” as if there’s some future chance of it starting with “The Moon” or “Mars”. Gotta keep potential expansion opportunities in mind! I love the fact that not only can I find properties overseas but also right here in Australia. We certainly could have done with a site like this the last time we went to NZ. *sigh* Better late than never, huh? You can mark favourite properties with a little heart. I can tell you right now, I ♥ Otalo.
Tags: Australia, Earth, Holiday Rentals, New Zealand, Otalo, Recreation, Travel, United States, Vacation rental
Posted by Miss Maccy on Feb 17, 2009 in
Activities,
France,
Travel with kids,
UK Disneyland Paris reviews.
This site is called “Theme Park Insider”. As well as general information about the Park, it has reader tips, hotel reviews and ride ratings. It’s a great resource for planning a trip to a theme park.
Sadly, other parks in Paris are not covered or any of the other parks in France 
They do have a few other European parks – including the all important Legoland Windsor!!! YAY.
Tags: Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Legoland, Theme Park
Posted by Miss Maccy on Feb 16, 2009 in
Packing,
Travel with kids Shhhhh! Top 10 Quiet Travel Toys.
Fantastic post on Travel Savvy Mom with ten ideas for quiet travel toys. I love the caterpillar – sadly mine are all too old to appreciate it’s greatness. LOL.
Tags: toys, Travel with kids
Posted by Miss Maccy on Jan 28, 2009 in
Gizmos,
Travel with kids Due to unforeseen circumstances – mainly Leonardo’s mouth growing so much in a week that the plate they sent out by mail didn’t fit – we had to make a repeat journey today of our epic adventure into the CBD. Apart from the fact that it was at least 42 degrees (that’s over 107 y’all) it was a much smoother and more successful trip. Yes, it had MOMENTS, but for the most part it was a much easier trip. The key reason for this was that I cashed in all my baby sitting chips and only took Leonardo. Wow, just taking only one child somewhere is a whole different ball game from taking the whole team.
*Disclaimer* Now I must warn you that probably after reading the next bit you will think I am Queen CrankyPants but I will remind you that it was 42 degrees and I am obviously still suffering from the after effects of our last mission impossible. And my parents dog died this week – which has nothing to do with this – but I am just saying.
Anyway, the thing is that last week sometime I read a comment a gentleman travel blogger had made about travelling with kids. He was referring to his travels with his child and said something along the lines of … “this has been a fantastic experience and our kid has coped brilliantly … kids totally do not need gameboys and other electronic rubbish when travelling.” You have to realise that isn’t the exact quote but a paraphrase. But it has completely irritated me on sooooooo many levels. I’ve been stewing on it all week and now I have to vent before I spontaneously combust.
First up – all kids are different. If you have a lovely, quiet, compliant girl who likes to sit and read horse stories for hours on end, you may not need a gameboy.
Of course, if we had one of those types of kids, we’d probably still buy them an ipod and make them read their stories on that, but moot point, as we completely forgot to have any children like that. All kids have different learning styles, temperaments, energy levels and sensitivity levels that make them completely different as travellers. With the same gene pool, environment and upbringing we ended up with three completely different kids who cope completely differently with travel. Leonardo was a dream baby who would happily go anywhere, anytime and sleep anyplace. CityHall was a baby who would start screaming ten minutes after leaving. She’s downgraded to “are we there yet” but it’s still sapping. I guess if it hadn’t been phrased as a blanket statement but rather “this was our experience and we found OUR child was perfectly happy without being plugged in”, I’d have been a lot less irritated. As it was, to me it came across as pretty judgemental.
Secondly, as I was made aware today, the number of kids you take with you makes a big difference. One kid plus one kid makes it about twenty times more complex. I tell you I am in awe of anyone who makes it out of the house who has more than three kids. I am convinced that if we had ten kids, I wouldn’t even make it out to the mailbox to collect the mail.
Thirdly, IPODS AND GAMEBOYS ARE AWESOME, what is wrong with him?
Tags: gameboy, ipod, Kids and Teens, Shopping, Travel
Posted by Miss Maccy on Jan 21, 2009 in
Packing,
Travel with kids Today was one of those terrible, no-good, long and horrible days. While nothing majorly bad happened (we all still have our main limbs intact etc) it was one of those nightmare days when nothing goes as planned and a simple jaunt into the city which should have been all-over-red-rover in an hour took three instead. It was pretty much downhill from there. It was a good reminder that the best laid plans of mice and men can go badly awry and that a back-up plan for the back-up plan is always a good idea. So lessons before we hit the road:
- No one in this family is ever playing hide and seek again. Especially not in a shop. Enough said.
- Refillable water bottles are my new best friend. We will take these through security empty and fill them up on the other side. After that, nobody is going anywhere without one staple gunned to their forehead.
- Public Transport “time tables” should perhaps be considered “tables of intent” .
- Divide and conquer. The kids have quite different attention spans in things like the art gallery. Leonardo was miserable to have his time cut short but CityHall was going to spontaneously combust if we stayed a minute longer. I forsee “parent tag” as our new survival strategy.
- Those little ladies who carry round umbrellas for shade are onto a good thing.
Anyway, it was one of those days that was going to require copious amounts of chocolate to aid recovery or something equally indulgent. Fortunately our travels just happened to take us past a Lush store. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmmm. Of course we had to go in – but only you understand, because I was buying stuff for our upcoming trip. Here’s my little stash of loot:
I got two solid shampoo bars and a teeny tin of solid perfume. I have a confession to make in regards to Lush Lust. I don’t actually like the smell of most of their solid shampoo bars. And standing inside a Lush shop with all of the other overwhelming scents, it was very hard to tell exactly what they would smell like. We have already had one incident of some Lush shampoo being banned from the bathroom by SGM, so I really, really didn’t want anything with an offensive smell that might permeate all of our suitcases. The reason I got two was that if you bought two, you got a free tin to go with it, and in my weakened emotional state, that seemed like a good idea at the time. The blue one is,
[amtap amazon:asin=B001ACQ62I]
And the white one is
[amtap amazon:asin=B0016O5QUI]
The solid perfume I thought was going to smell a lot more caramel like but SGM’s first reaction was that it was quite floral.
[amtap amazon:asin=B000XTQHT6]
At the counter I got a very nice surprise, they were giving away excess Christmas stock and we actually came home with four additional products for free! That was a very bright spot in an other wise poxy day and now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe my bubble bath is calling me…
Tags: Art museum, Lush, Perfume, Public transport, Shampoo
Posted by Miss Maccy on Jan 16, 2009 in
Travel Guides,
Travel with kids,
Uncategorized After Christmas I went and did the rounds of our local libraries, I have to confess I was hoping to find a guide book along the lines of “Where to Stay in Europe if you Accidentally take Your Children”. It became painfully obvious that our local libraries are not inundated with families travelling to Europe, hmmmm. One of our libraries had a copy of the excellent 
Take Your Kids to Europe, 7th: How to Travel Safely (and Sanely) in Europe with Your Children
This is a fantastic book which I can’t recommend enough. After I finished reading through the library copy I realised I had bookmarked every second page and so it was necessary to buy our own copy. It is absolutely loaded with information and is a fantastic resource in planning a trip in general. However, there are a few areas where I wanted even more specific information. Although Harriman encourages families to travel “off the beaten track” because of the scope of the book, she does not go into details about specific locations. There are recommendations scattered throughout the book but for the most part, the book is about managing the trip. Also Harriman’s emphasis is on going for as long as you can rather than squeezing as much as you can into a short space of time.
Another guide book series that is excellent in terms of getting off the beaten track are the books by Rick Steves and Co. These are great in that he is all about travelling very economically without necessarily backpacking (and you can find location specific advice). He does include information for families in each book but overall his target audience are “mature travellers” and those requiring standard accommodation for one or two people. Plus guidebooks for specific locations.
The best guidebooks for details about sights to see are the Eyewitness Travel Guides by DK. These are stunningly beautiful books with illustrations of all the best sights and loads of historical information. They are like having a tour guide on tap and I think particularly helpful in deciding which sights you want to see in a particular area. However, I wouldn’t rely on them for affordable accommodation or even eating recommendations.
All of these guidebooks are great and I’m using all of them, however none of them could be classified as Family Travel Guidebook Nirvana. But I did not despair. Well, ok, actually I did despair, quite a lot. But I did not give up and my intrepid searches on Amazon were finally rewarded by finding the Holy Grail of Family Travel guide books. Frommers have just published an entire series of books for families and they are brilliant!!!
You can find the list of Frommer’s with Families guide books here:
Tags: Europe, Family Travel, Guidebooks, Holidays, Kids and Teens, Travel with kids
