Everyone ELSE is sharing travel tips.....

Thoughts of Traveling with the Kiddos. 1) Get a late start. We are NOT morning people, though we go through phases when we can do nothing but wake up in the early hours - rarely am I ever happy about it. So on vacation, we all sleep in as much as possible and try to add in evening activities to 'make up for lost time' - not that that is a real thing. So far, this has worked well. In Europe, we started at noon and ended at 9-11pm. The kids got to see some of the nightlife and we were prevented from over-exposing them to 'culture'. Since museums and such generally close early, we had fixed time to force it down their throats and they appreciated that. 2) Check for evening hours. Aha! Just because we don't get up early doesn't mean we CAN'T do culture late! The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay had evening hours until 9pm. We started late, missed the crowds and enjoyed the evening vibe. The Smithsonian does this too in summer. 3) Use apps! We downloaded a TON of apps (mostly free) for our last trip. While internet when we were out and about was sporadic since we were not using cellular data, when we were within Wi-Fi, we used our apps to plan and I used the screenshot function to save the info. When those bits showed up in my PhotoStream, it was quite nostalgic for me. Maps were often not accessible offline either so I used screen shots. In the US, we use an app called Roadside America that shows you crazy and odd things near where you are at the moment. World's largest ball of twine? Foamhenge? I keep a folder for current event apps on my phone which helps with getting into the local swing of things. Favs? Smithsonian, Roadside America, Maplet, National Park Service And don't be afraid to delete and reload apps. Disney's Wait Time app is only useful on the 2 days a year you are in the park, but man those days are much more awesome with it than without! 4) Cameras, cameras, everywhere! My kids LOVE taking photos. So everyone had a camera. My teen had an old Nikon D40 and my littles had their ipod Touch and iphone cameras. We all took many photos and since they ended up in the same photo library eventually, it was cool that our snaps came from everyone. And a side note, why not do family pics while on vacation?  I read about this online and found an American photographer in Paris who gave us an hour of her time for a very reasonable price.  We got family photos, something we had not done since before my 7rd old had been born, with the Louvre and Eiffel Tower in the background. Brilliant?!  Yeah, I think so!  

5) Prepare for the worst. Before doing much, I searched online for the most miserable experiences people had and then tried to figure out who to circumvent them. I expected to spend all of our 2 weeks in Europe soaking wet. I bought umbrellas (coming from AZ we never had these before), rain coats (stylish ones since I knew they would be in photos) and even an adorable rain poncho for the littlest monkey. It was cool to have new things for the trip and made the little rain we did encounter kind of fun! 6) Hang it up. For our trip abroad I bought the London and Paris Passes, cards that give free or line cutting admission to places. We also got the travel card option so we also had train tix. But what to DO with the darn things! In the end, I bought lanyards from Hot Topix with cute phrases for the three kids. Each had a plastic ID holder that we used to hold 1) the city pass 2) the metro tix 3) a business card with all our numbers preprinted and our flat address handwritten. The kids had room to put a paper bill but chose to use their pockets for that. I was surprised but we didn't lose anything big (on the last day, one metro tix went missing because it did not make it back into the lanyard pocket but that was a cheap fix). We hung them up the moment we got in and everyone helped by checking everyone else. I had peace of mind that the kids wouldn't lose their location info in a strange land and it was a blessing being able to visually see those lanyards and knowing that everyone had their passes. 7) Make the most of travel day. We were flying on a red eye which made the day we left feel odd. In the end, our good buddy offered to let us leave our vehicle at his house near the airport so we made a day of it and went to his place early. There was a great park nearby so we bought a lunch and had a picnic while our kids ran amuck. The kids were happy and exercised (like puppies, see!) when they finally plopped onto the plane. It was nice they had that time since it made the plane ride itself less confining. 8) Figure out the day pack in advance. We have a rule that since I plan, I do NOT have to tote. So I am exempt from having to carry anything I do not want to carry. But there is stuff I want to take (bandaids, tummy tamers, extra SD card). I prepacked our day bags so I was sure they wouldn't be too heavy and would have all the essentials. My eldest is old enough to be a Toter so was assigned a day pack. I consider these to be the essentials - weather modifiers (rain gear, coats, or sun screen/hats), maps/guides/tickets, medical (advil, moleskin, tums, bandaids, anti-allergy), water (1 bottle for emergencies), snack (we bought local candy bars because by the time you realize you waited too long to get a meal, the only thing that will get into a kid quick and easy is candy... and the kids loved trying out different brands of candy). Additionally, we carried my camera and sometimes an extra lens (depending on where we were going). 9) Don't be afraid to splurge on one thing that is awesome. I had this idea that England should be all about castles. But the ones I remembered were from a driving trip I did with my folks as a child, not the fancy schmancy "do NOT touch" ones you find in the cities. And we were spending most of our time in London. But it nagged at me long enough that I investigated online, searching for 'best castles to take kids' and 'try not to miss this in England'. The online folks were brilliant and led me to a very isolated ruined castle that was amazingly intact - Old Wardour Castle. The kids went nuts! The gift shop sold foam swords and the kids spent several hours defending the castle from each other. It was a trip highlight. Further investigation led me to a castle that had been turned into a hotel and was offering a Sunday night April special. We drove (an experience in and of itself) to Stonehenge then to Old Wardour and then to Thornberry Castle where my children slept in the room that King Henry VIII and Anne Boylen stayed in while on Progress. We finished the experience with a stop in Cardiff at the Doctor Who Experience and spent sunset at Oxford. I got some amazing deals, but over all this WAS a splurge. And I think it really made the trip for us all. There ya go! Our travel tips, based on our European adventure.

Remember EVERYTHING? Eh, maybe.

This weekend I embarked on an ambitious project, convincing the OldWindbag (OW) that he should join me in EVERNOTE - wonder of the OCD world. Here is some context. OW is a paragon of organization. He is awesome when it comes to finding tidbits of info that one (of his daughters) may have forgotten. AND he does this despite being an OCD nut and absolutely refusing to keep practically anything! Really. Alas for years he has being using an archaic system of Microsoft Word documents to keep his personal notes - everything from his will (which covers how my sister, Natalya, and I will split up our inheritance of 1960's and 1970's vintage albums) to driving directions. And this method works. Certainly, when he started using Word it was the only game in town. But it has a huge flaw, a lack of searchability. Say OW needs to know the exact name of his anti-farting prescription medicine. With his current system, OW must remember which .doc he wrote and saved it in. Was it filed under "OW visits the Quack 2009" or "OW visits the Quack 2011"? Certainly you can search for a filename easy enough. But if you can't remember what document you saved that info into, well expect to spend some time crawling through old data. SO this weekend, I attempted to wean OW off of Word as a note-taker. Word was designed with document creation in mind and it does a fine job for that. But OW is really keeping notes, not documents. And he needed an intervention. And in steps the BIG HERO - EVERNOTE. I was a fairly early adopter of this little app. Frankly, I just fell in love with the green elephant symbol. I used it sporadically at first but, like other relationships in my life, we really hit it off once gadgets join in. More on that in another post... no, not about THAT. About EVERNOTE and gadgets! EVERNOTE (skip if you are a believer already) is a free service/application that let's you take and make audio, photographic, textual notes and keeps them updated across all your devices (iPad, iPhone, computer, Android). You can clip webpages to EVERNOTE and you can send emails straight to your EVERNOTE account. Within the app are personalized Notebooks which can be kept private or shared with others. There are many many many developer add ons that help make EVERNOTE even more productive, all found in the Trunk. For instance, Skitch lets you draw and annotate photos. Scalar performs calculations, which can be saved into a Notebook. Hello creates a facebook (little 'f') in your account, complete with snapshots of your contact's business cards. So you are sold, right? I sure was. But OW was a hard sell. See the man had wanted THIS product back when computers where brand spanking new. He knew that carrying around paper was an old man's folly. But since it wasn't available, he invented a complex system of computer hard drives, floppy disks, zip drives (remember those?), and now thumb drives that he meticulously updated on a regular schedule, backing each and every copy each and every time. Now that one simple program could do ALL the backing up automatically, it scared the pants off him. To trust or not to trust? To ease him into it, I carefully copied and pasted each and every note from his travel thumb into his brand new EVERNOTE account. What I mean is I opened each document, selected all the text and then copied/pasted it into a new note. It was time consuming. OW was hoping he could just keep on with updating his .doc and then save those into EVERNOTE. While I was willing to let him have a little bit of both for a while, I was pushing to get him switched over so that he could see how easy it could be. He wasn't easily convinced. In fact, I wasn't sure he would do anyting more than erase the whole mess once he got away from me until this afternoon when I got a tech support request. OW wanted to know if EVERNOTE could password protect his individual notes. Not exactly EVERNOTE will let you look at any Note if you are logged in. But you can Encrypt certain text within a note, which is essentially the same result. That's when OW grudgingly admitted that already EVERNOTE had come in handy. He had been trying to remember when a particular script had been first prescribed (anti-farting, perhaps?) and had tried, on a whim, to search EVERNOTE. Since we had imported all the Word Documents, including the meticulous notes OW keeps on family members with medication conditions, he found it in a snap. EVERNOTE will search through not just the Note names but also the text content, including the text content of web pages. Indeed, EVERNOTE, in conjunction with my favorite gadget ever - a scanner - will search the OCR'd text of anything you have ever uploaded. Just a few minutes ago, I needed my checking account routing number so I searched for my bank name and low and behold, EVERNOTE found me a photo (A PHOTO!) I had taken of our checkbook! So OW is a tentative convert. For the moment. He is going to LOVE this, eventually. It helps that doing this just cost us an afternoon and nary a penny. EVERNOTE offers a generous free account that so far has been adequate for the kids and Eric. But once you try it, you'll find yourself wanting to change your life by going paperless. At 45$ a year, the Premium account allows many more uploads and offers more bells and whistles. After purchasing a recommended scanner, I was able to take 5 feet of file cabinet paper to the shredder, not to mention the stack of school work and art that I scanned and saved (and was able to justify letting go!) So EVERNOTE is our friend. Mine more than OW's but he is catching on. It was a productive day. PS Can I say how proud I am of the OW who is always willing to try new technology out, provided it is free or nearly so?

What Not to Read "WARP Book 1 The Reluctant Assassin" Eoin Colfer

I should be forgiven for assuming I would love this. With a subtitle like "The Reluctant Assassin", who wouldn't want to read and love it? But I have tried Mr. Colfer before and I wasn't impressed then and I am not impressed now. Simply put, he is patronizing. The story standards are all there in their trite glory. There are a few orphans, Americans obsessed with guns, a few Dickens rip offs and - what annoyed me the most - a teenager who works for the FBI but is sooooooo good that she can disarm any full grown officer and lay him down flat. Really? Sure we all KNOW this is fiction but this is beyond fiction and absurdly fantasy. To boot, the writing is simplistic and that makes me feel like Mr. Colfer just doesn't respect his young audience. Give us some artful imagery, some culture with the crass fight scene. Be an artist and slip some ART into the story. If it were not for the time warp aspect, this would have no redeeming qualities. Actually, it doesn't. Just the name. I like THAT.