Posts Tagged travel books
Miles of Smiles: Book of Road-Trip Games for Kids
First published in 1992, and revised in 2002, this paperback book by seasoned travel writer Carole Terwilliger Meyers is filled with 101 car games and activities. I’m guessing this book will be good for quite a few of our family road trips, as we only made our way through about five activities on a recent three-hour stretch of driving.
Some games in Miles of Smiles are best for older kids, say 10 and up, but others — like “I Spy” and “Straight Face” (which involves saying a very silly phrase) can be played by children as young as 4. Games are indexed in the back by age recommendation, which I think is brilliant.
We entertained ourselves “Minding our P’s & Q’s” — racing to see who could spot the most P’s and Q’s on road signs and license plates in a short amount of time — and playing the old favorite “Who Am I?” — where someone thinks of a famous person to “become,” and others have to guess who it is by asking questions like, “Are you still alive?” and “Are you male or female.” (The kids threw a loop into this game by becoming cartoon characters their mom and dad had never heard of!”
We really had a good time trying to say the tongue twisters listed in the book, like “Leon the lovable llama licked lollipops in Lima.” And trivia questions stumped even the most trivia-minded in the car (my husband). Are you familiar with the proper names for these animal groups: a covey of ants, an army of frogs and a troop of baboons?
I’m keeping my copy of Miles of Smiles in the seat pocket of our mini-van, so my children can pull the book out and play a game even on a short jaunt to Wal-Mart. I highly recommend Miles of Smiles for your next family road trip. Purchase it for $8.95 on Amazon.com.
Related stories: Three Kids’ Travel Activities, Table Topics to Go.
Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on September 3rd, 2010
Three Kids’ Travel Activities: Stickering, Journaling & Morphing
For my family’s seven-day, seven-state family road trip earlier this summer, I needed to be armed with some quality activities for the car. Sure, the kids had their Nintendos and iPods, but I knew there would be times when I’d want them to unplug, so here are three items I brought along, and our firsthand reports:
Stickers! and Incredible Stickers!: These colorful paperback books are simply charming and fun to flip through. I’m not surprised they were originally published in Japan, as some of the characters remind me of that chubby little Hello Kitty that is so popular among Japanese schoolchildren. In each, kids are encouraged to decorate a page spread with stickers found in the back of the book; stickers are sorted by color and numbered, as well, so the stickers intended for each page (say, candles for a birthday cake or mittens for snowmen) are labeled. Of course, there are no rules, and kids can decorate as they see fit!
I’m partial to the Incredible Stickers theme, where images of donuts become spaceships to detail, and a slice of bread becomes a house that is begging for colorful windows. Triangle-shaped sandwiches are mountain peaks and heads of broccoli are giant trees. The pages are super clever and little kids will find them super silly.
Preschoolers might need some help peeling and sticking, but these books are “play alone” activity for anyone over age five. In fact, I think kindergarteners are the ideal age for the sticker books. Still, my 8- and 10-year-olds got a kick out of the goofy scenarios, and from the back seat, while they were playing with them, I’d hear things like, “Look mom – the radishes are dancing!”
The books retail for $7.95 each on the Seven Footer Press website. I also found them on Amazon.com.
Children’s Travel Journal: My tween-age daughter fell in love with this spiral-bound, black-and-white diary on sight. She’s a “fill in the blanks” type of kid, and was pleased to find that she didn’t have to “write from scratch” on each page. Instead, she drew pictures and filled in a calendar of the dates that we’d be gone, and answered questions about “why we chose this destination” and “what I’m most looking forward to.”
While on the trip, she detailed a page titled “Landmarks” about our trip to St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, and on the “Museum and Galleries” page she wrote about our excursion to Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Opposite these topic-centric pages are blank pages for writing and sketching. I like that the pages are made from cardstock and the cover is clear plastic with an elastic fastener — the book is meant to last, since it’s preserving important vacation memories.
One caveat: This journal seems like it would best fit a child who is traveling to a foreign country, since it has a world map inside to trace the route of the trip, an area to jot down the currency exchange rate, and a section to write translations for common words like “hello,” “good-bye” and “where’s the bathroom.” Still, my daughter enjoyed filling in the blanks where it was appropriate on our U.S. vacation.
The book is available for $15 on The Little Bookworm website.
Morph-O-Scopes Packets: My art-project-loving daughter also had fun with this activity, where you color a “morph” — a thoroughly distorted black and white image — and then place a curved Mylar mirror on top of it to reflect the “correct” picture. See at right, where it’s hard to tell what the heck you’re coloring on the page, but the picture appears as clear as day in the “cup” above. To figure out where exactly you’re coloring, you need to look at the cup, but put your crayon on the paper. The optical illusion requires a bit of hand-eye coordination and brain power, for sure.
My kids used their own crayons and markers with the “Stretched Pets” packet, which came with five morphed coloring pages and a self-hooking mirror “decoder,” all packaged in a clear plastic hanging bag. (Fairies and dinosaurs are two other themes.) But you can also buy Morph-O-Scopes Kits, which come with 32 activity pages — mazes and games, in addition to the coloring pages — as well two mirror decoders and 16 crayons, all in a carrying case.
The Morph-O-Scopes Packets sell for $7.99 and the Morph-O-Scopes Kits for $19.99 on the manufacturer’s website.
More kids’ travel activities:
Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on July 30th, 2010
Kindle e-book Reader – Under $200, Now Practical Travel Gear
[Editor's update - the Kindle price has now dropped even more, to below $150 if you don't care about the 3G wireless access.]
When Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader first came out, I was baffled that anyone was buying it. It seemed like very few other people saw it as a worthwhile value either. Two years ago I asked in this post, Do you know anyone actually using a Kindle?
When it first launched, the Kindle went for $399, which was just plain silly. Then it dropped to $299, which was still the price of 20 or so new hardback books. Then it dropped below $250 (when I bought it—grrrr) and has now come down to $189.
I still wouldn’t call that a steal, but it’s now not a hard purchase to justify if you’re a traveler or you have kids who come with you. I am a traveler, but had trouble pulling the trigger on it until the latter reason came into play: I was going to be moving to Mexico for a year and knew I’d need more books for my daughter than I could drag along or buy locally.
Which brings me to the greatest feature of this e-book reader: you can download books in an instant from international locations. So let’s say you’ve run out of reading material in Puerto Vallarta, London, or New Delhi. Press a few buttons and presto, you’ve got a new book loaded and ready to go. If you read a review that sounds promising, you can download a sample first. If you like it, click the buy button and it’s done. Publishers have jacked up the price of some books, but most are still $9.99 or less, down to free in the case of public domain titles—most of the classics.
But what’s it like to read on this thing? Not perfect, but not bad. I’d still rather have a real book on my nightstand, but when on the move this is a good substitute. It doesn’t strain your eyes, it’s easy to hold in bed, and it feels almost like reading real paper and ink instead of a glowing screen (like the iPad has). Since it really is meant to do just one thing—deliver a book to your eyes—you’re not tempted to check your e-mail or go surf a website. To me that’s a good thing: no temptation to remove yourself from the immersion. (You can post to Twitter or Facebook from the Kindle, but thankfully not many people seem to want to do this.)
Where it bests a regular book is its instant defining of any word you put the cursor on. It’s also searchable. When you make bookmarks or highlight text, you can see a list of all those places you marked later in one spot. Since you can store more than 1,000 books on it, there’s no limit to what you can carry around in this little 10.6-ounce package. The battery life is really impressive: you can read a whole long novel before it runs out of juice. I’ve gone weeks, then it recharges in four hours. The keypad works far better and faster than the electronic one on a pad/touch device.
There are downsides though. It only displays one page at a time, so you’re hitting that “next page” button (loud enough to irritate a bedside companion) quite often. It doesn’t show page numbers while you’re reading, rather a percentage of completion, which feels quite odd. It’s harder to flip though, to browse, to mark a page, etc. Using a search function for something like a guidebook is not nearly as simple or quick as just turning to it in the real thing. The e-pub format used is not kind to illustrations and maps, which is another reason this is still a sub-par experience compared to a regular guidebook. It works better for straight-text books like novels.
With most any e-reader, there’s no such thing as a used book and it’s hard to loan one to a friend—like you easily can with a real book—without giving them your $189 reader. What do you do with a book when you’ve finished it? Good for the environment, but it doesn’t feel like you really own an e-book.
There are some other features that I tried out quickly but don’t use, like a text-to-speech reading function, a built-in PDF reader, a newspaper subscription service (extra $), wireless Wikipedia access, and an MP3 player.
The pros far outweigh the cons, especially now that the price has dropped down below $200. If you’re a frequent traveler packing light or a parent whose kid plows through a lot of books, I would recommend plunking down the money for one of these sooner or later.
My colleague John has reviewed a few other e-readers, including the the Sony Reader, but neither of us has tried the Nook from Barnes & Noble to make a comparison. For me the worldwide 3G wireless access, included in the purchase price with no ongoing contract (compare that to your iPad bill) was the clincher.
Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free Global 3G – $189 & free shipping
See other e-reader posts.
Posted by Tim in General Gear, Kids and Family, Travel Light on July 14th, 2010
BookSwim Book Rental for Reading on the Go
Here’s a service for avid readers who might be traveling in the United States for a while and who don’t want to lug a bunch of hardcover books on multiple plane trips and back home again: BookSwim, a book-rental-by-mail program.
Modeled after Netflix DVDs you rent by mail, with your BookSwim membership, you browse an online catalog and create a “pool” of books you want to receive (get it – pool, swim). Rank your books according to the ones you want to receive first. The number of books you’ll receive at once depends on the plan you have (ranging from 3 books at time for $23.95/month to 11 for $59.95/month).
Return books at your leisure, with no late fees and no due dates. And you’re never without books. For example, with the 3-books-at-a-time plan I’m sampling, I can return two books while I’m reading the third, so a couple more will be on their way in the interim.
Here’s how it might be helpful for long-term travelers: it’s easy to change the shipping address for your next batch of books. If you know you’re spending a week at Aunt Mary’s lake cabin in August, have books sent there; if you read a couple and are ready for new books for your next vacation stop at a friend’s house in the mountains, change the shipping address to theirs. I’m thinking that RV road-trippers who might be taking an entire summer to explore the United States could use BookSwim to read and return books for several months (if they do have a general agenda and far-flung friends and relatives throughout the country; currently books are only shipped to U.S. addresses).
Sure, e-readers might be most ideal for travelers — given that devices like the Kindle or the Nook mean you only have to carry around one light item, as opposed to multiple books. But, for now, I’m still old-fashioned. I like flipping paper pages.
What I like most about my temporary BookSwim membership: no long wait for the hottest bestsellers. Currently, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help has a whopping 78 “hold requests” on 8 different copies of the book that my local library owns. If it weren’t for BookSwim, I’d still be waiting to read the (excellent, excellent) book. But instead, I put it on the top of my “pool” a couple weeks ago, and had it (and two other books) in my mailbox six days later (via a UPS/USPS hybrid UPS Mail Innovations I’ve never heard of).
I shouldn’t complain about the short wait to receive books, but once I signed on for my membership and made my list of what I wanted to read, I wanted them now. Alas, I’m used to speedy Netflix mailing — seems to me I put a movie in the mail Monday, and I’ve got a new one on Wednesday — but that’s because Netflix has regional supply centers throughout the U.S. BookSwim rentals are all sent from the Pennsylvania warehouse. (Hmmm. Given my impatience, I wonder if I really would be happiest with an e-reader, where I can download books within minutes!)
But back to BookSwim… besides New York Times fiction bestsellers, there are children’s books (listed by age group), and all sorts of non-fiction categories, from cookbooks to self-help, business to sports. Basically, much of what you’d find in a library — minus audiobooks, reference books and foreign-language titles — is available through BookSwim.
For more details on how the service works — including what happens if you damage a book — read the BookSwim FAQ.
Posted by Kara in Travel Light on July 9th, 2010
Would You Rather…? Crazy Question Books for Kids
Last week I covered an educational travel activity workbook for kids. This week, it’s all about having fun. There’s no educational merit here (unless you consider any and all reading to be educational — from the Sunday comics to cereal boxes — and I do).
The Would You Rather…? series of books from Seven Footer Press each contain more than 300 questions designed to promote conversation, entice giggles, and in some instances, bring on a bit of nausea. That is, if you have a weak stomach and two silly kids in the backseat of your car reading questions from the “Doubly Disgusting” and “Gross-Out” editions ($9.95). For example, on our recent multi-state road trip, everyone in the car had to answer:
- Would you rather have 20-inch nostril hair or 20-inch-long toenails?
- Would you rather suck in air with the force of a vacuum when yawning or have blow-dryer strength farts?
- Would you rather lick your friend’s chicken pox or use Tabasco sauce eye drops?
- Would you rather suck every drop of sweat from the socks of the Dallas Cowboys after a game or eat a sandwich wrap made from shedded snake-skin filled with a mixture of fingernail clippings?
Just typing that last one made my stomach turn. But they’re not all totally nasty questions. Consider these sort-of silly ones:
- Would you rather have glow-in-the-dark veins or only be able to watch one TV show for the rest of your life: Dora the Explorer.
- Would you rather be able to fly, but only see in black and white or be able to be invisible, but lose the ability to see and taste?
Scintillating stuff! Who thinks of these questions anyway? Actually, your kids can write their own in the spaces provided at the end of these paperback books. That’s always fun — trying to come up with your own bizarre scenarios.
Plus, each book has funny cartoons illustrating some of the crazy, hypothetical situations presented. One drawing of a kid flying through Burger King (don’t ask) prompted huge belly laughs from my kids. Weeks later, when either of them says “Burger King” in a funny voice, they erupt in laughter.
And frankly, any travel activity that brings on laughs while helping to pass the time on a long car ride gets a huge thumb’s up from me. I’d recommend these two Would You Rather…? books for children any day of the week. Also see the “BFF” version ($9.95) for high-school-age girls, and decidedly grown-up versions, too, like the, er, “Ultimate Sex Edition” ($12.95) which contains “more than 700 ludicrously lustful dilemmas to ponder.”
Browse all options at Seven Footer Press and look for discounts at Amazon.com.
Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on July 2nd, 2010
