Posts Tagged travel books
5 Things I Always Pack – Chris Epting
Chris Epting is the author of 18 books including James Dean Died Here, Roadside Baseball and Hello, It’s Me – Dispatches From a Pop Culture Junkie. He also writes for many publications and is the longtime national spokesman for the Hampton Hotel Save-A-Landmark program. Here’s what always goes into his bag:
1. My well-worn copy of Blue Highways – this venerable, classic travel tome by William Least Heat-Moon sits in my bag like the old friend that it is. Oh, I’ll have some other books and usually a few magazines as well, but Blue Highways makes every trip. I’ve read it many times, and for me it’s so good, that I will just randomly open to it, read a few a few pages, then stow it again until the next time I need a little smile or inspiration. See, it functions not just as entertainment for me, but also as a lesson book – a powerful example of the importance of evocative, descriptive writing. Since I almost always write on the road,
a book like this becomes indispensable – because its literary rules of the road are so timeless.
2. Yellow pads and No. 2 pencils – In lieu of travel journals I instead always pack a couple of yellow legal pads and some sharpened No. 2 pencils. It’s what I write with at home and I like to replicate the writing experience as much as I can on the road – that is to say lots of scrawls, random thoughts, snapshot impressions, diagrams, etc. Nothing against nicely crafted journals and fancy pens, but the pads, for me, are a reminder that this whole journey is an ongoing work in progress; a creative continuum from one pad to the next.
3. Maps – either in book form or just map form, I like to take some physical representation of where I’m headed. These days, people tend to get hung up with onboard GPS, handheld mapping and lots of other cartographic gadgetry. That’s fine (and I use those occasionally too), but for me there’s nothing like using an old-fashioned map to get a sense of scope, terrain and organization – even if I’m returning to familiar place. The hand-held, bird’s eye view is invaluable to me. And if the map is worn, creased and has a few miles on it – all the better.
4. A handheld digital recorder – I’m used to traveling with a couple of cameras because I shoot a lot of pictures, video, etc. But more and more I find myself relying on my little digital recorder. Whether it’s for interviewing someone I meet along the way, or even ambient sounds of a sonically pleasing place, my little recorder has come in handy dozens of times. Off the top of my head, I remember a few years ago being at an old-fashioned amusement on a humid summer night. The music being piped through the carousel (“Beautiful Dreamer”), the laughter of children under the stars, the bell from the Strongman Striker, the whoosh of a wooden coaster – that recording made the piece I wrote all the more powerful when I got home.
5. A St. Christopher Medal – My wife packed this in my satchel years ago and I’ve never taken it out, whether I’m traveling with my family or by myself. The medal, in honor of the third century martyr and “Patron Saint of Travel”, is special to me. It’s said to guard against lightning, archers, storms, floods and other threats to we, the wanderers. And these days, I’ll take whatever I can get.
To see a sampling of Chris Epting’s work, check out his Perceptive Travel stories on Death Valley; cocktail birthplaces and historic bars; and places where rock stars spent their last night on Earth.
Posted by Tim L. in General Gear, Kids and Family on July 6th, 2011
Chronicle Kids Books for Traveling Families
Keeping a child occupied while traveling is not always easy, especially when you’re faced with long flights, long bus rides, or boring interstate car rides. Or even worse, delays waiting around for any of these to start. Sure, you can just give up and let them zone out with DVDs or electronic games, but you know deep inside that all that passive activity where their brain is turned off can’t be good all the time.
I’ve been consistently happy with the ones for kids put out by Chronicle Books. As I noted in this review last year for the Julius Pop-up Sticker Activity Book, when these say “hours of fun,” it really turns out to be true.
When my daughter got this extension of the Worst-Case Scenario book as a gift, she devoured it for days on end, reading passages aloud and pointing to the pictures when she came upon a funny one. Besides this Weird Junior Edition—which explains how to defeat Medusa and how to keep a vampire away among other survival tips—there’s a new Gross Junior Edition as well. This one covers bloody noses, “gas leaks,” barfing, and other embarrassments. At less than $8 at Amazon right now, it’s a steal.
My 10-year-old daughter has also bee loving this Uglydoll School Planner. It’s not related to any specific year and can be started at any time, so it’s a good gift for whenever. It’s full of funny stickers for different events, plus its spiral bound and sturdy—with an elastic band to hold it together with additional papers even.
She smiles every time she looks at this planner and I have to admit I do too. At the moment we’re living in a foreign country and she’s going to school in a foreign language, so it’s nice to have things like this along to make it a little easier.
See more from the Chronicle kids line of books and activity kits, including the new MoMa Modern Play Family kit for hipster parents of young children.
See more reviews of travel books for the road.
Posted by Tim L. in Kids and Family on October 20th, 2010
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 L. in General Gear, Kids and Family, Travel Light on July 14th, 2010
