Emily Bazelon admits that she’s not one for exposing her kids to heavy cultural programming on vacation—most of the time. But, she writes in Slate’s summer vacation special issue, “on this particular Sunday, I was also feeling the prick of inadvertent peer pressure: a friend’s offhand comment that her kids had been to the FDR Memorial more times than she could count. Whereas mine had been there never.” The resulting field trip has mixed results—and Bazelon shares some lessons learned in her essay.

Photo by jimbowen0306 via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Here’s a sweet tale to stoke any post-Christmas family travel buzz you might have: Inspired by three albums of cryptic travel photos her grandmother passed down, Patricia Morrisroe dives into her family’s past and traces the roots of her own wanderlust. “As for future generations,” she writes in Travel+Leisure, “if my grandmother had purposely set out to frustrate them with the photo albums, she couldn’t have done a better job.”

Related on World Hum:
* Slide Show: Reflections of Home

We all know how tough it can be traveling with kids, and these days it only seems to be getting tougher. But how about trying it without a co-pilot? In an article in the Times of London, Jane Owen lists non-profit organizations and travel agencies that offer custom-designed holidays, discounts or other opportunities to single parents and their children. The offerings range from ways to dodge single room supplements to full-on group holidays, where the theory is “that if single parent families eat together and play together, the parents will be more relaxed and the children will have more fun.”

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Well-traveled children often turn out to be more empathetic, open-minded and creative adults. We’ve written about how parents are increasingly taking their infants and toddlers on trips abroad and how parents are lighting a spark of wanderlust through imaginative travel books. Now more families are taking a year off work, school and soccer practice to travel the globe and learn about new cultures firsthand, writes Caren Osten Gerszberg in The New York Times.

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I’m not a parent, so I can’t fully appreciate the struggle of traveling with toddlers. But I was fascinated to read Emma Mahony’s story in the Times of London about drugging her son on a long-haul flight. Mahony, the mother of a young boy and infant twins, came across the idea at a social gathering of mothers of twins. She writes: “Before I joined an evening out with mothers of the local Wandsworth twins’ club, I was a virgin to the pharmaceutical names of sedatives. There, after a few glasses of wine, the subject of drugging toddlers to travel came up, and the stories began to flow.”

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The Los Angeles Times offers its take on Las Vegas’s top six pools for families. Among those making the list: Flamingo Las Vegas ("a 15-acre tropical oasis with four pools amid pounding waterfalls and mature foliage"); Golden Nugget ("teems with real sea life and a three-story water slide"); MGM Grand ("five pools in a 6.6-acre water complex"); and Mandalay Bay ("kudos for putting 6-foot-high swells in the middle of the desert"). For the true budget-minded Vegas pool connoisseur who delights in variety, of course, there’s always pool-crashing.

Related on World Hum:
* Sin City Weighs New Slogan: ‘Your Vegas is Showing’
* When Are Children Old Enough to Travel Abroad?
* The Art of Pool Crashing in Las Vegas

Photo by JoeBehrDenver via Flickr (CreativeCommons).

Iconic destinations in Italy, Australia, California and the Pacific Ocean are at the top of travelers’ minds this week, as well as a topic that’s more controversial than Hillary Clinton. Here’s the Zeitgeist. 

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
36 Hours in the Cinque Terre, Italy

Most Read Feature
World Hum (posted this week)
The Lost World of Nigeria

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Through the Roof: A Tour of the Country’s Priciest Hotel Suite
* The cost to stay in the Ty Warner Penthouse at the Four Seasons New York? $30,000 a night. 

Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph UK (current)
Exploring the Great Barrier Reef

Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (posted this week)
Voluntourism: ‘Overpriced Guilt Trips’ or a ‘Real Chance to Save the World’?

“Hot This Week” Destination
Yahoo! (this week)
Hawaii

Most Viewed Travel Post
BlogHer (current)
The W Hotel: Form over Function?

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Earlier this month, AP travel editor Beth Harpaz wrote a column suggesting there might be a growing backlash against traveling families, and specifically, kids on planes. She pointed to recent news reports of a nursing mother ordered off a plane and a mother and boy booted off a flight after the boy repeatedly said, “Bye, bye plane.” Wrote Harpaz: “Sure, I have heard kids babbling, singing songs and playing games on airplanes. Yes, I have heard them complaining or crying when their ears hurt or they are bored. But that’s OK. I don’t mind. A world without children and their sounds is not a world I want to live in.”

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If you want to instill wanderlust in very young kids by traveling with them, read this. If you want to instill wanderlust in kids without taking them on the road, World Hum contributor and Washington Post travel book critic Jerry V. Haines has some books for you. He reviewed six travel books for kids in Sunday’s Post. In the books, Haines writes, “children can go to other lands and other centuries, unrestrained by logic, laws of physics or other unfortunate realities.” Among those he recommends: Angelina’s Island by Jeanette Winter and Hugo and Miles in I’ve Painted Everything! by Scott Magoon. 

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I’m a new father, and as I suspected, my wanderlust didn’t subside with the birth of my daughter. So I pored over Beth J. Harpaz’s recent AP story exploring whether children can be too young to travel abroad—Harpaz put the question to a number of well-traveled women and mothers, including Pauline Frommer and Maureen Wheeler. The general consensus: Children under 3 or 4 don’t get much out of it, although at some deep level it might instill in them a sense of adventure and curiosity. Wheeler, who co-founded Lonely Planet, told Harpaz, “I started traveling with my children when they were babies and that’s just stupid. It was exhausting.” But she added, “I honestly think that it gave them an attitude for life, because they learned to be very flexible.”

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Out: Tom Sawyer and books. In: Jack Sparrow, movies, video games and, yes, vertical integration. Last October, Disneyland fans were wondering whether park officials would ditch Tom Sawyer for Jack Sparrow, turning Tom Sawyer Island, which was designed by Walt himself and opened in 1956, into a “Pirates of the Caribbean"-themed attraction. Or, as one observer put it, “Will Disney abandon book-lovers for Pirates 2.0?” Absolutely, Disney officials announced today, though they’ve slyly kept the island’s original name. On Friday, Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island will debut, timed, not coincidentally, with the opening of the latest “Pirates” film, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

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Nobody brings the world together like muppets. The new season of the PBS series Independent Lens debuts this week with the documentary The World According to Sesame Street, a look at how the TV show for kids has become a global phenomenon. Los Angeles Times critic Robert Lloyd writes in a stellar review: “It runs in more than 120 countries, mostly in dubbed versions of the original, but in more and more places—beginning as far back as 1972, after an inquiry from Germany—it is being produced locally, retooled for the native audience, with new characters and settings reflecting native culture and concerns.” The documentary focuses on productions of “Sesame Street” in three countries places: Bangladesh, Kosovo and South Africa. 

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