Family Travel

Subways, Buses, and Backpacks: Teaching Kids Frugal Travel Skills

July 9, 2012

This is a guest post I just wrote for the Center for a New American Dream website. I bumped into my friend Sarah the other day.  As we stood in the hot, dry Colorado air I asked about her summer.  Turns out her family had just returned from their annual trip to Norway where her [...]

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Mountain Goats and Spiderman: Using the Tools of the Mind Program

April 7, 2011

Over Spring Break our family visited two National Parks in Utah, Arches and Canyonlands.  We stayed in the small town of Moab, where an interesting mix of ex-uranium miners and twenty-something mountain bike enthusiasts live tucked in between towering red rock mountains.  Although the boys and Todd did enjoy some challenging mountain bike trails which [...]

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Starfish One By One: An Amazing Guatemalan Non-Profit

February 17, 2011

Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, has been very inspirational reading for me.  It demonstrates the creativity people use to make ends meet when given a leg up, via a small business loan or scholarship. Prior to our trip to Guatemala, I learned of an organization called Starfish One By One located [...]

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Spanish Language Immersion in Guatemala

February 10, 2011

(Names of our Guatemalan friends have been changed.) As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our family has traveled to Central America for Spanish language immersion two summers in a row.  Initially we went to Costa Rica which was a fitting first destination since we could drink the water there.  When traveling with kids, this little [...]

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Spanish Immersion in Costa Rica: Unexpected Highpoints for My Kids

January 20, 2011

If you read last week’s post about our family’s experience learning Spanish in Costa Rica for a month, you no doubt got the impression that it was a fairly trying adventure, but an adventure nonetheless! My summary at the time of this type of travel with children was: On the one hand it is incredibly [...]

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Learning Spanish as a Family in Costa Rica

January 13, 2011

Two summers ago our family traveled to central Costa Rica for a month to live with a local family and learn Spanish at a language school.  Our kids were 11, 9 and 6 at the time. I’d conceived of the notion of learning Spanish as a family and thought we should do it during the [...]

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Family Train Trip.

October 20, 2010

When we stepped up onto the California Zephyr in Denver one hot July evening, my family had no idea what to expect. I’d booked the trip on the strength of fond childhood memories of chugging up the Northeast Corridor in the 1970s, in the infancy of Amtrak. My husband, Todd, had no such memories to [...]

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