Trip Ideas By Activity
There are so many ways to vacation with your children.
City explorations, museum sleepovers, condo-style rentals, road trips, mountain and lake cabins, beaches, cruises, and all-inclusive vacations stretch budgets. Resorts run the gamut from moderate to pricey. Staying midweek or during shoulder season saves money.
Dream trips—African safaris, Galapagos treks, polar bear watches—deliver the thrill of wildlife encounters but at a hefty price. Farmstays, state and national parks, and hikes through Costa Rican rain forests let you enjoy animal encounters at a fraction of the cost.
Time travel fascinates kids. At living history parks, march with the militia and meet pioneers. In Europe, tour centuries-old castles, climb atop medieval walls, and stroll streets laced with 18th-century buildings. Go back millions of years to the dinosaur era. Satisfy your kids’ curiosity by going on a dinosaur dig, walking in dinosaur footprints, and ogling fossils of these fierce critters in museums.
Build sandcastles at the beach, canoe and fish at a lake, get tossed, twirled, and dropped on rollercoasters at an amusement, ski downhill, or snowshoe through snowy woods.
Stay overnight, for a few days, or a week. Plan carefully, allow for spontaneity, know that things will go awry, and maintain your sense of humor. Have fun.
Winter Wildlife Encounters: Polar Bears and Whales
Great Family Vacations||by Candyce H. StapenCategories: Adventures, Canada, Family, Nature Vacations, Trip Ideas, Wildlife and Safari VacationsFew things compare to getting within two feet of a 1200-pound bear in the sub arctic or so near a gray whale in the Pacific that you can smell the fishy scent of his blowhole spray.
Whether you opt for polar bears and ice or whales and warm beaches, these wildlife encounters will turn winter from a boring to a brilliant season.
From the outdoor viewing platform, we watch the 10-foot tall polar bear, North America’s largest land carnivore, step slowly, but deliberately, ambling towards us across the frozen terrain of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. When this arctic giant stops alongside our vehicle, he jumps up, presses his huge paws against our tundra buggy’s metal sides, and stares. Then, he raises his snout, the size of a man’s forearm, ever so slightly back and forth– the better to sniff us.
We stand transfixed, but surprisingly unafraid. Up-close, these bears with their round bellies, purple tongues and pigeon-toed gaits, remind us more of overgrown stuffed toys than vicious predators. Also, our super-sized bus’ glass windows as well as its outdoor, elevated deck remain reassuringly just out of the bears’ reach. Plus, Frontiers North, our outfitter, has been taking people on tundra adventures for years.
How much wildlife you see depends on the weather and the animals. About 1200 bears roam the Churchill area from mid-September to early November. They gather along the west shore of Hudson Bay, waiting for the water to freeze in order to hunt seals from the thick ice. When the bay turns solid, the bears depart.
On our three day trip in late October polar bears surround us. We sleep on the bears’ turf in a base lodge created by linking the stationary buggies into a train-like hotel. From the dining and parlor car windows, we observe bears rolling on their backs, juggling clumps of frozen kelp, or snoozing, nestled against snowdrifts. After breakfast each day, we board a roving buggy to search the flat landscape for more white giants. We come across mothers with cubs as well as males playfully rearing up to swat each other. We also see black ravens, fat as house cats, and arctic hares scampering through the willow banks.
One night a blizzard of thick snow and roaring gale winds literally rocks our lodge, but the next evening, the sky turns so clear that the northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, glow like godly fireworks, dancing across the heavens in undulating sprays of green, blue and white.
Alas, a polar bear safari comes with a few inconveniences. It takes a long time to arrive in Churchill; most arrangements require overnighting in Winnipeg. Although you can take day trips to the bears from town of Churchill, staying on the ice adds to the experience by giving you more time with the bears without seeing other buggies. However at the Tundra Lodge, you bed down in a single bunk-like train berth and share two toilets and one shower with 16 people. But for animal lovers like us, the Tundra Lodge is worth the trouble; the trip is one we’ll remember forever.
We spot the telltale heart-shaped spray not 40-feet from our skiff. Within seconds, the back of a 40-foot long Pacific gray whale breaks the surface. The whale then dives out of sight, only to reappear inches from our boat—so close that we can almost pat her barnacled head. Her curious calf rolls so close to the bow of our boat that we can hear the rhythmic whistle of its inhaling. Both cow and calf gracefully dive under our boat only to circle back to our port side.
For decades these whales have made the 5000-mile journey from Alaska to Magdalena Bay, Baja California where the protected lagoons provide safe havens for birthing and nursing. During prime whale season, February through mid- March, nearly 17,000 whales inhabit the bay.
On our family-friendly camping trip with Outdoor Adventure River Specialists (OARS), when we aren’t yelling “Thar she blows!” we swim, slide down sand dunes, sea kayak through a nearby mangrove estuary, and admire the night’s starry, starry skies.
Information
Frontiers North Adventures:
204-949-2050, 800-663-9832,
www.tundrabuggy.com.
Book well in advance, as polar bear season is short.
Outdoor Adventure River Specialists
800-346-6277, www.oars.com
Discovering Roots in Krakow, Poland
Great Family Vacations||by Candyce H. StapenCategories: Adventures, City and Cultural Vacations, Europe & Scandinavia Destinations, Historic, Trip IdeasEven as a child I was curious about Eastern Europe, land of my Jewish ancestors and, as it came to be, my husband David’s too. In the past few years like many Boomers, I’ve felt a need to make a pilgrimage, to connect with this lost world. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to see the shtetls in Russia and the Ukraine that my grandparents left as children; these, of course, no longer exist. Rather, I needed to experience the land that once nurtured this thriving community and to pay my respects to those turned to ashes. We started in Krakow, Poland. We walked to Kazimierz, the Jewish Quarter, which had been home to Jews for 500 years. Before World War II, Kazimierz bustled with 68,000 Jews. The district’s cobblestone streets and courtyard alleys were featured in the movie “Schindler’s List.” During WW II more than 65,000 inhabitants were murdered.
Now, only about 150 elderly Jews remain.
Those numbers and the old man handing out yarmulkes at the restored, 1862 Temple Synagogue made me think of ghost towns even though Jewish delis and cafes are reappearing. Achingly beautiful, the building, with its gilded gold and green wood, cranberry benches and floral stained glass windows, bears witness to the once flourishing community. The tiny Remuh Synagogue, established in 1553, is still used for prayers. During WW II the Nazis and Poles smashed most of the cemetery’s tombstones, dragging them into the street to be trod upon. Now the broken pieces form a commemorative wall, sometimes called “the wailing wall Krakow,” a sobering site that made us think of all the loss and violence, of broken things that can’t be put back together.
In Kazimierz at the Galicia Jewish Museum, a bookstore/café/ and gallery, we browsed Chris Schwarz’s photographs “Traces of Memory.” Contemporary photographs of the Holocaust, the images are of trees growing in the rubble of synagogues and other similar shots. But why call his facility the “Galicia Jewish Museum?”
David’s mother’s family hailed from Galicia, a region, she had told us, was somewhere in Lithuania. At the museum, however, we learned that Galicia included Krakow as well as Lvov, the town where David’s maternal great-grandfather was born, but also parts of the Ukraine, the region of my father’s ancestors. Without knowing it, we had stumbled into the streets of our forefathers.
Related links:
www.polandtravel.com
www.krakow-info.com
Poland’s Auschwitz and Birkenau
Great Family Vacations||by Candyce H. StapenCategories: Europe & Scandinavia Destinations, Historic, Trip IdeasSomehow, we always imagined it to be raining at Poland’s Auschwitz and Birkenau, the infamous killing complex of W.W. II. But the sun shone when we toured, led by a Butterfield & Robinson hand-picked guide Dorita Nicz, whose two, non-Jewish uncles were sent to Auschwitz for giving water to an escaped prisoner. One died and the other survived, but not his spirit. “I was a little girl, but I remember he never smiled, “ said Ms. Nicz . He talked only to my grandmother and he kept always a piece of bread in his pocket.”
As Ms. Nicz led us through the camps, she recounted the systematic torture and murder. Although Auschwitz stands as a synonym of man’s inhumanity, Birkenau, built with four gas chambers since the Jews and other prisoners were arriving faster than the Nazis could “liquidate” them, horrified us more.
Although the Nazis set fire to Birkenau as the Allies approached, a wooden barrack remains as well each unit’s brick chimney.
We walked for nearly three-quarters of a mile, passing rows upon rows of chimneys. Each one represented temporary housing for hundreds of prisoners soon to be gassed.
Another B& R surprise: an interview with 86-year-old Kazimierz Smolen, a Polish partisan and survivor of five years imprisonment at Auschwitz, and also the former director of the Auschwitz Museum. In Polish, as our tour leader translated, he told us of life at Auschwitz.
For three months the SS kept him and others standing in a totally dark cell; many suffered strokes. Each morning and evening the SS conducted roll call outside. Weak, starving and barefoot, Mr. Smolen and the other prisoners were often made to do the “bear dance “ by turning around in circles with their arms raised above their heads, sometimes for three or more hours. When the inmates stopped or lowered their arms, the SS beat or shot them.
Food consisted of one litre of herbal tea in the morning and 250 grams of bread in the evening and sometimes soup. Mr. Smolen was one of the 4,000 prisoners forced to build Birkenau, working from 5 am until dark in muddy fields and marshes. Each day 10-15 men died of exhaustion. When the Nazis learned Mr. Smolen could type, they gave him the indoor job of registering those about to be exterminated. By 1942, 3,000-5,000 Jews a day arrived at the camp. “We worked all day and night, but we couldn’t give receipts for so many people, “ said Mr. Smolen .” So we only gave out numbers for about 500. The rest were soon burned in the crematorium.”
By 1944, 10,000 people arrived each day, but only about 4,500 could be burned daily, so bodies were stacked in piles. “You cannot imagine the smell,” noted Mr. Smolen. “When a transport arrived, after the men, women and children were separated by the SS men, we would hear people crying out names of a sister, a son. And then hours later all was silent again,” he said.I asked Mr. Smolen what helped him survive, how did he get through each, horrible day. He looked at me, his blue eyes wide, and sighed heavily. “Friends,” he said. “Each day we found new friends to help.”
And that’s when I cried.