500 Places to Take Your Kids Before They Grow Up

Or, 500 Tacky Tourist Traps it might be better to avoid.

I guess you can tell from my sub title I’m a little underwhelmed with this book. It’s a disappointing offering from Frommer. I’ll cover what I think are the major flaws of the book.

First of all, it’s organised by themes. So chapter one is “awesome vistas’, chapter two is “exploring the scenery” right through “walk with animals” to “budding scientists” to “rides and thrills at the end”. Don’t get me wrong the themes sound great. The problem is that for each theme they then pick one or two highlights from each continent basically. This creates a kind of artificial selection, so that for theme parks we have Lunar Park in Sydney as the major offering (eh?) rather than focusing on the fact that the Gold Coast has a cluster of whizzie woo woo theme parks (and that maybe a park like Wet ‘n’ Wild Water World is more iconic of Australia). There are quite a few choices in the book that felt like this type of token gesture to me. I mean, really did someone pick Lunar Park of wikipedia?  I can’t think of any other plausible reason for it’s inclusion.

The other problem with themes is that it isn’t how you actually travel. You travel geographically. While there is a small  geographical index at the back, it was almost like an after thought. There were maps provided of all the major countries but while the main cities were marked, none of the actual attractions or destinations were. I’m not sure what purpose they thought these maps were going to serve but they certainly don’t help you to work out where to go.

Let’s take an example of a family visiting New Zealand. You want to know what things you must see. It’s a long way to get to NZ from anywhere, so you don’t want to miss out on anything, right? In the index fro NZ the attractions we have listed are: Fiordlands National Park, Mount Cook (ahem, correct name Aoraki or at the very least Aoraki/Mt Cook), Rotorua, Stewart Island and Wellington Cable Car. If you’ve never been to NZ before, you might well wonder where these things are. Well, don’t use the maps in this book, on NZ it has marked: The North Island, Wellington, The South Island, and Stewart Island. Now we have been to NZ several times. In fact Super Gizmo man had to take Beckham across the ditch just a couple of weeks ago. I did the planning and listed all the places they really should visit depending on where they got flights. In the end they flew in and out of Wellington. Not once, not once did it even cross my mind as a merest flicker that they ‘really should go on the cable car’. If you are in Wellington with kids, the places you should make a bee line for are Te Papa which is the fabulous national museum and the Karori Santuary. If you need a bit of public transport excitement, then Wellington has the only public trolley bus system in Australasia.

Another problematic aspect of the book is it’s US centric focus. Now I am sure that the US is an amazing place to visit but the mere fact that a whole chapter is devoted to “Settling America” is pretty telling. Especially when American places dominate the other categories as well. Maybe a better title would have been “Places American’s should consider taking their kids”.

Compounding the disappointing nature of the places selected is the fact that the selections seem to focus on major cities and traditional tourist destinations. I confirmed this with my flick through of their choices fro France and Italy. D’uh oh! We neglected to go to almost all of the places they mentioned. Give me Pienza any day over Rome for an amazing cultural experience for kids. Famous Bridges selected were the historic choices of the Tower Bridge, London and Le Pont Neuf, Paris. Where is the hair raising Millau Viaduct (France) the tallest vehicular bridge in the world? Or the Forth Railway bridge in Glasgow, the first bridge and major structure in the UK to be built of steel ? Instead the choices are those found in any travel agents brochures. There are no hidden gems waiting to be discovered. Instead this book follows a very paint by numbers approach to exploring the planet. Hard to believe this is published by the same company as the brilliant “with your family” travel series. Save your money for those or the much glossier Travel with Kids by William Gray.

Tags: books, Europe, Landmarks, Travel with kids, United States

Sometimes ignorance IS bliss!

Our tickets are booked and paid for.

Ignorance is certainly bliss when it comes to torturous flight routings.  I’m already dreading it!  *fingers in ears* lalalalalalalalala

I’ve just picked up 10 books from the library on various aspects of travel to the USA.

In order to narrow down what we would like to do with our time I have started on the books about road trips.  Ignorance is most definitely bliss when you start to look at the many places that you could travel to.  If we had unlimited time and money oh the places we could go!

These books are both fabulous and do not in anyway help narrow things down.  Rather they expand the possibilities!   I think I will get a lot of good information from them.
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This book on the other hand;  is completely useless because it doesn’t have even one National Park in an area we are travelling to. Thank heavens for small mercies!

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I have the 3rd edition but National Parks don’t change that much surely?

Tags: Road trip, United States

Just in case you are contemplating the delights of a third child….

If you like to travel… just say NO.    Two children are just fine.

I’m not even going to discuss the impact of the extra body on cars and suitcases.

You know all those lovely family rooms you read about?  Yeah, they are for people with 2 kids.  A family is 2 adults and 2 kids, once you hit number 3 your accommodation options decrease dramatically in number and increase exponentially in price.

Take New York:  unless we want to pay USD400 a night plus tax, we are stuck with either a backpackers, many of which won’t guarantee us our own room, or travelling to Union City, NJ or Jamaica, NY.  Good fun.

In New York I have it down to two options:

1/ The West Side YMCA.   We can get a room with 3 sets of bunks for $210 using a shared bathroom.   They will even give us the room to ourselves! And because they are a charity they don’t charge tax, which can be exhorbitant.   They have an onsite pool, fitness classes (for when I haven’t had enough exercise after a day of walking… yeah right!) and they are right by Central Park.  But they don’t have any kitchen facilities or even a refrigerator.   Bunk beds, welcome to America!

2/  Embassy Suites Secaucus.  It has the benefit of being $50 a night cheaper AND including breakfast and getting real beds and a private bathroom,  and a simple kitchenette thingy.  But it’s a train ride into town which would cost us $30 a day.

Decisions, decisions.

Tags: New York, United States

Allow me to introduce myself

I’m Sandra aka keptwoman.

Miss Maccy Pants has invited me to join her as a guest blogger. Why? You ask.

Well, it appears that with very short notice we are off to the USA for a wedding in September.

In 2002 we hosted Pamela, a lovely 17 year old from Paraguay through AFS.  Pamela was the 5th student we hosted. She was with us for a year, she calls us Mum and Dad and we consider her very much a part of our family so we wouldn’t miss her wedding in Maryland to the wonderful Dan for all the world!

Now 6 months might not seem like very short notice, but when you have to come up with $10,000+ to go it’s very very short. So we are a family of 5, heading to the USA on a very tight budget.  I just love a good challenge!

So, here I am, joining Miss Maccy Pants in the lunacy of dragging 3 kids along for the ride on a trip overseas.

Tags: United States

Where have you been all my life?

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.

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Tags: Australia, Earth, Holiday Rentals, New Zealand, Otalo, Recreation, Travel, United States, Vacation rental