Liz Sullivan
The kids are out of school for one precious week, and you want to take advantage of every day of it to show them a bit of the world. Where to begin? Whether you want to head somewhere warm or explore what our vast country has to offer, we have suggestions to help you choose a memorable family vacation.
Photo Caption: A child at the Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, ON.
What does an "ice hotel" look like? Picture 15,000 tonnes (more than 33 million pounds) of snow and 500 tonnes (approximately 1.1 million pounds) of ice, showcasing a new architectural design each year. Quebec City and now Montreal are the only two places in North America where you and the kids can explore (or spend the night) at one of these magical creations -- until they melt, of course.
The original ice hotel in Québec City (www.hoteldeglace-canada.com) is just ten minutes away from downtown. Entrance (about $20) allows you to tour the property from 10am to 8pm; if you arrive after that the price is only C$13 as the sleeping quarters are off limits. And, yes, people really spend the night. There are 21 basic rooms and 15 individually designed suites that offer a themed decor, all with a queen-sized mattress on a block of ice. Guests get a Nordic sleeping bag to keep them warm, up to -40 degrees Celsius -- plenty cozy when the interior room temperature averages a balmy -5 degrees Celsius. Things everybody can enjoy are the exquisite Ice Chandelier, the Ice Chapel (there are 20 weddings in an average year), Ice Slide (for kids of all ages), the Ice Café, and the Ice Bar, where the signature cocktail (ice cider and vodka) is served in a flute chiselled from ice. Should there be a naysayer travelling with you who just can't take the cold, there's a heated pavilion, including a restaurant, just next door.
Montreal's Snow Village (www.snowvillagecanada.com) on Ile-Ste-Helene (Parc Jean Drapeau metro) has a slightly smaller hotel with 15 standard rooms and 10 suites. While it lacks a few of the features of its counterpart in Québec City, it also offers the chance to sleep in an Inuit-style igloo, and gaze at an ice replica of Montreal.
Photo Caption: Interior of Quebec City's Hotel de Glace
A late winter storm rages at its peak. Amidst tempestuous winds, ocean waves as high as six metres (20 feet) smash the beach, white spray lashing against jagged headlands and huge logs careening into the sand. It's awe-inspiring, a total contrast to the image of serene natural beauty that draws visitors to Tofino the rest of the year. Here, in this laid-back town of 1,600 on the west coast of Vancouver Island, facing the open Pacific Ocean, storm-watching has become a major attraction. In March you can catch the last of the big winter storms, donning a yellow slicker to get outdoors and see some amazingly fierce weather.
The lavish Wickaninnish Inn started the trend in the late 1990s, and boasts some of the best views. Two more well-regarded resorts await in nearby Cox Bay, only a tad less luxurious. Long Beach Lodge Resort (with its cottages equipped with fireplaces and hot tubs) and Pacific Sands Beach Resort (with its luxury beachfront villas) both offer panoramic ocean views.
Want to get a real close-up look? Outside magazine hailed Tofino as "the best surf town in North America" in 2010. It gets amazingly consistent big waves, lots of great beaches for beginners, and water temperatures hold steady year-round at 10°C (50°F) along Tofino's 35 km (22 miles) of coastline.
Before you can carve waves on spacious Long Beach, or underrated Cox Beach, you'll want some cold-water gear. A number of businesses have sprung up to address the needs of surfers, including Pacific Surf School (www.pacificsurfschool.com), which offers lessons and camps for beginners, plus rentals and gear sales (private lessons are also available). Live to Surf (www.livetosurf.com) is Tofino's oldest surf shop and has the largest selection of new and used boards, and offers lessons and advice on local beaches. Surf Sister (www.surfsister.com) caters exclusively to female surfers.
Photo Caption: Winter surfer along the beach at Tofino.
Toronto definitely offers plenty of fun for kids of all ages, from the amazing delights of the Science Centre to the imposing dinosaurs at the Royal Ontario Museum. Even getting around town can be a treat -- a ride at the front of a subway or streetcar can keep little ones amused for a surprisingly long time. And you'll want to check out all of it -- many attractions have special March Break programming for kids.
The Ontario Science Centre has been delighting young and old with its interactive exhibits -- more than 800 of them, spread throughout 10 halls -- of technology, biology, and physics since 1969. You could literally spend the whole day here (and your kids, who will be having a blast, might insist on it). KidsPark is a learning center and playground where junior Einsteins eight and under can build a roller coaster, cook a meal, or explore the mysteries of water. Older kids can test their skills in the Sport Hall; wander through a real, live rain forest; or go on a virtual airplane flight.
Imaginative kids get a lot out of this, Toronto's only castle, Casa Loma. Adults can soak up the palatial design and furnishings while adventurous little ones investigate the stables, secret passages, and 244m (800-ft.) tunnel.
At the Royal Ontario Museum, kids can't enough of the cavernous place -- especially the dinosaurs. There are 50 dino specimens, including 25 fully mounted skeletons, representing 120 different types of dinosaurs. Gordo, the museum's 27m (90-ft.) Barosaurus skeleton, is the largest dinosaur on permanent display in Canada. Videos and other interactive displays provide helpful and fun background.
Kids and families get the deluxe treatment at Harbourfront Centre, with programming and events geared specifically to them year-round. HarbourKIDS is an ongoing program of indoor and outdoor fun, including free movies, skating (both ice and, inside, on skateboards), arts and crafts, and sports activities. The Natrel ice rink, right next to the lake, is Toronto's largest outdoor rink and there's good hot chocolate in the adjoining Lakeside Eats café.
Photo Caption: Dinosaur exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, ON.
Only 65km from the Miami airport, The Everglades is a strange ecosystem: a drawling grassy river that's rarely more than knee-deep, but spreads some 65km wide, harboring an exotic population of manatees, hawksbill turtles, water moccasins, coral snakes, panthers, armadillos, muskrats, opossums, river otters, herons and egrets. It's the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles live side by side. There's nothing like it anywhere else -- and it might not be here much longer, given the encroaching development in southern Florida. Bring the kids here now, particularly during the March dry season, to dip a paddle into this River of Grass while it still flows.
While you can stick to dry land -- driving or biking on the paved park roads, or walking short nature trails through jungle-like patches of forest -- the whole point of this place is that it isn't dry land. What you really want is to feel the sway and lap of the park's waters, the lazy grace of its fluid meander through mangroves and cypresses and sawgrass prairies. Rent canoes at the Gulf Coast Visitor Center, on FL 29 in Everglades City (tel. 239/695-3311), or the Flamingo Lodge by the Flamingo Visitor Center, at the end of S.R. 9336 at the southern tip of the park (tel. 239/695-2945). In a canoe you'll be incredibly close to the water level, casually coexisting with gators and birds as if you're part of their natural environment.
Photo Caption: Photo Caption: Everglades National Park in Florida.
You and your family can actually find peace and solitude in America's most-visited park, Frommer's choice for best family destination for 2012. With some 520,000 acres, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, is one big, welcoming tent. You and your family can cocoon yourselves in true wilderness, hike a trail in utter silence, and camp out in the hush of a hardwood forest -- all in spite of the fact that the Great Smoky National Park is visited by eight to 10 million people a year.
Yes, if you visit in the summer high season you will at times feel like a salmon on a spawning run, with Grand Caravans clogging the roads and Dolly Parton theme parks dialing up the cornpone, but in early spring daytime temperatures can crack 20 degrees Celsius at lower elevations and visitor levels are half the summertime peak. Head to the park's highest peak, Clingman's Dome, soaring to 6,600 feet above sea level. Angle for fish in trout-rich streams, lakes, and rivers. Reach out and touch the stars on a blue-black night in one of the park's 10 developed campgrounds.
True beauty is all around, from the sweeping curves of the Blue Ridge Highway to the sparkle of the sun on a burbling mountain stream. Climb the spiraling roads by car or put your two feet on the ground and hit the leaf-strewn Appalachian Trail. Carolina pines scent the air, and scarlet rhododendrons dot the hills. Listen to the concert of leaves fluttering in the breeze. You will be doing what untold folks have done before you -- from Cherokee warriors to coonskin-clad pioneers -- and it will feel fresh and new. And when the swirling silver mist crowns the mossy peaks, you'll understand why these smoky heights continue to fascinate, as they have for untold centuries.
Photo Caption: Sunrise in Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.
Once, the British Colony of Antigua was known for its sugar plantations; today it's an independent nation known for a different kind of sugar -- the fine white sand of its myriad beaches. Locals boast that Antigua has a different beach for every day of the year. Of course that's an exaggeration, but Antigua's indented coastline is fringed like a sea anemone with little bays and outlying coral reefs, and nearly every one of them protects a sandy beach.
This is the sort of idyllic vacation spot you expect the Caribbean to offer, and it's worth experiencing it at least once. Antigua is an expensive island, with small, exclusive inns rather than high-rise package-tour resort complexes, but just about any hotel you choose will have doors opening right onto the ocean and sand. Usually vacationers plunk themselves down at the beach by their hotel and never move; there aren't many sightseeing attractions on Antigua to lure you from your hotel -- not unless your children are Master and Commander fanatics who are keen to tour the restored Napoleonic-era dockyards 18km (11 miles) southeast of the capital, St. John's.
However, with such a wealth of beaches so close together, it's fun to sample each one's distinct character. Dickenson Bay, in the northwest -- the side of the island with higher winds, breaking waves, and dramatic scenery -- is favored by families with young children for its wide strip of powder-fine sand and calm turquoise waters. The swimming is quite safe, and all the amenities you need are close at hand -- you can rent watersports equipment at the Halcyon Cove Hotel and slip inside for drinks and snacks at casual restaurants nearby. If you've got snorkelers in your group, just north of Dickenson Bay is Paradise Reef, a 1.6km-long (1-mile) coral garden. On the more exclusive southern coast, it's worth a drive to gaze upon the strikingly blue waters of Carlisle Bay: Against a backdrop of coconut groves, two long beaches extend from a bluff, and you can actually tell where the calm Caribbean waters meet the more turbulent Atlantic. East of here, at Half Moon Bay, you can see that Atlantic surf kicking up, and watch windsurfers skim the waters out past its reef; the reef itself protects the waters nearer shore, making it good for a family swim.
Photo Caption: Shoreline along Antigua.
Steven Spielberg's film The Adventures of Tintin introduced North American audiences to Belgium's third most-loved export -- beer and chocolate being numbers one and two.
In Spielberg's film (a blend of several original Tintin stories) author/artist Hergé's globe-trotting hero Tintin and his canine sidekick Snowy tumble through a series of adventures that are part Indiana Jones, part Pirates of the Caribbean. In the books, Tintin and Snowy visit the Congo, Tibet, China, Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union (Russia), South America, the Arabian Desert and outer space. But the journey for real fans begins in Brussels, which is a family- and budget-friendly introduction to Tintin's far-flung adventures.
The Belgian Comic Strip Center, a five-minute walk from the Grand-Place, is a great way to begin to explore the birth of Tintin and the back story of his Belgian born artist/author creator, Hergé. The Center, housed in a grand old art nouveau building, shows revolving exhibitions of Belgian comic strip history but always has something to delight Tintin fans such as the original paint pans and pencils Hergé used to bring his heroes to life and a life-sized Tintin astronaut statue. The Musée Hergé located in the Brussels suburb of Louvain-la-Neuve is a must for die-hard Tintinites. Although it's a trek to get here, fans of the original series and older children and teens won't want to miss the most comprehensive collection of Tintin-related art and artifacts in the world. The exhibits, including original art and scale models of ships, rockets and local flora and fauna that the artist used to imagine Tintin's world travels, range over multiple floors.
The Hotel Amigo located steps behind the Grand-Place is one of Brussels' most loved five-star hotels with staff and service that rival the Four Seasons. It's also a Tintin lover's dream with three new Tintin-themed deluxe rooms (one complete with its own rocket to the moon) and one deluxe Tintin suite that even has an electronic version of Marlinspike Hall's butler answering the room phone (rooms start at ¬319, the suite is tagged at €1,150 per night). The family package (¬293 per night in a classic room) offers kids' rooms free, a 50% discount on food for children under twelve, admission to the Hergé Museum for the whole family, a Snowy plush doll, a Tintin walking map and interactive Tintin games and movies on PSP and Wii for each family room.
Photo Caption: Tintin mural celebrating the opening of "The Adventures of Tintin" movie in Brussels, Belgium
Photo Caption: A child at the Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, ON.
The original ice hotel in Québec City (www.hoteldeglace-canada.com) is just ten minutes away from downtown. Entrance (about $20) allows you to tour the property from 10am to 8pm; if you arrive after that the price is only C$13 as the sleeping quarters are off limits. And, yes, people really spend the night. There are 21 basic rooms and 15 individually designed suites that offer a themed decor, all with a queen-sized mattress on a block of ice. Guests get a Nordic sleeping bag to keep them warm, up to -40 degrees Celsius -- plenty cozy when the interior room temperature averages a balmy -5 degrees Celsius. Things everybody can enjoy are the exquisite Ice Chandelier, the Ice Chapel (there are 20 weddings in an average year), Ice Slide (for kids of all ages), the Ice Café, and the Ice Bar, where the signature cocktail (ice cider and vodka) is served in a flute chiselled from ice. Should there be a naysayer travelling with you who just can't take the cold, there's a heated pavilion, including a restaurant, just next door.
Montreal's Snow Village (www.snowvillagecanada.com) on Ile-Ste-Helene (Parc Jean Drapeau metro) has a slightly smaller hotel with 15 standard rooms and 10 suites. While it lacks a few of the features of its counterpart in Québec City, it also offers the chance to sleep in an Inuit-style igloo, and gaze at an ice replica of Montreal.
Photo Caption: Interior of Quebec City's Hotel de Glace
The lavish Wickaninnish Inn started the trend in the late 1990s, and boasts some of the best views. Two more well-regarded resorts await in nearby Cox Bay, only a tad less luxurious. Long Beach Lodge Resort (with its cottages equipped with fireplaces and hot tubs) and Pacific Sands Beach Resort (with its luxury beachfront villas) both offer panoramic ocean views.
Want to get a real close-up look? Outside magazine hailed Tofino as "the best surf town in North America" in 2010. It gets amazingly consistent big waves, lots of great beaches for beginners, and water temperatures hold steady year-round at 10°C (50°F) along Tofino's 35 km (22 miles) of coastline.
Before you can carve waves on spacious Long Beach, or underrated Cox Beach, you'll want some cold-water gear. A number of businesses have sprung up to address the needs of surfers, including Pacific Surf School (www.pacificsurfschool.com), which offers lessons and camps for beginners, plus rentals and gear sales (private lessons are also available). Live to Surf (www.livetosurf.com) is Tofino's oldest surf shop and has the largest selection of new and used boards, and offers lessons and advice on local beaches. Surf Sister (www.surfsister.com) caters exclusively to female surfers.
Photo Caption: Winter surfer along the beach at Tofino.
The Ontario Science Centre has been delighting young and old with its interactive exhibits -- more than 800 of them, spread throughout 10 halls -- of technology, biology, and physics since 1969. You could literally spend the whole day here (and your kids, who will be having a blast, might insist on it). KidsPark is a learning center and playground where junior Einsteins eight and under can build a roller coaster, cook a meal, or explore the mysteries of water. Older kids can test their skills in the Sport Hall; wander through a real, live rain forest; or go on a virtual airplane flight.
Imaginative kids get a lot out of this, Toronto's only castle, Casa Loma. Adults can soak up the palatial design and furnishings while adventurous little ones investigate the stables, secret passages, and 244m (800-ft.) tunnel.
At the Royal Ontario Museum, kids can't enough of the cavernous place -- especially the dinosaurs. There are 50 dino specimens, including 25 fully mounted skeletons, representing 120 different types of dinosaurs. Gordo, the museum's 27m (90-ft.) Barosaurus skeleton, is the largest dinosaur on permanent display in Canada. Videos and other interactive displays provide helpful and fun background.
Kids and families get the deluxe treatment at Harbourfront Centre, with programming and events geared specifically to them year-round. HarbourKIDS is an ongoing program of indoor and outdoor fun, including free movies, skating (both ice and, inside, on skateboards), arts and crafts, and sports activities. The Natrel ice rink, right next to the lake, is Toronto's largest outdoor rink and there's good hot chocolate in the adjoining Lakeside Eats café.
Photo Caption: Dinosaur exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, ON.
While you can stick to dry land -- driving or biking on the paved park roads, or walking short nature trails through jungle-like patches of forest -- the whole point of this place is that it isn't dry land. What you really want is to feel the sway and lap of the park's waters, the lazy grace of its fluid meander through mangroves and cypresses and sawgrass prairies. Rent canoes at the Gulf Coast Visitor Center, on FL 29 in Everglades City (tel. 239/695-3311), or the Flamingo Lodge by the Flamingo Visitor Center, at the end of S.R. 9336 at the southern tip of the park (tel. 239/695-2945). In a canoe you'll be incredibly close to the water level, casually coexisting with gators and birds as if you're part of their natural environment.
Photo Caption: Photo Caption: Everglades National Park in Florida.
Yes, if you visit in the summer high season you will at times feel like a salmon on a spawning run, with Grand Caravans clogging the roads and Dolly Parton theme parks dialing up the cornpone, but in early spring daytime temperatures can crack 20 degrees Celsius at lower elevations and visitor levels are half the summertime peak. Head to the park's highest peak, Clingman's Dome, soaring to 6,600 feet above sea level. Angle for fish in trout-rich streams, lakes, and rivers. Reach out and touch the stars on a blue-black night in one of the park's 10 developed campgrounds.
True beauty is all around, from the sweeping curves of the Blue Ridge Highway to the sparkle of the sun on a burbling mountain stream. Climb the spiraling roads by car or put your two feet on the ground and hit the leaf-strewn Appalachian Trail. Carolina pines scent the air, and scarlet rhododendrons dot the hills. Listen to the concert of leaves fluttering in the breeze. You will be doing what untold folks have done before you -- from Cherokee warriors to coonskin-clad pioneers -- and it will feel fresh and new. And when the swirling silver mist crowns the mossy peaks, you'll understand why these smoky heights continue to fascinate, as they have for untold centuries.
Photo Caption: Sunrise in Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.
This is the sort of idyllic vacation spot you expect the Caribbean to offer, and it's worth experiencing it at least once. Antigua is an expensive island, with small, exclusive inns rather than high-rise package-tour resort complexes, but just about any hotel you choose will have doors opening right onto the ocean and sand. Usually vacationers plunk themselves down at the beach by their hotel and never move; there aren't many sightseeing attractions on Antigua to lure you from your hotel -- not unless your children are Master and Commander fanatics who are keen to tour the restored Napoleonic-era dockyards 18km (11 miles) southeast of the capital, St. John's.
However, with such a wealth of beaches so close together, it's fun to sample each one's distinct character. Dickenson Bay, in the northwest -- the side of the island with higher winds, breaking waves, and dramatic scenery -- is favored by families with young children for its wide strip of powder-fine sand and calm turquoise waters. The swimming is quite safe, and all the amenities you need are close at hand -- you can rent watersports equipment at the Halcyon Cove Hotel and slip inside for drinks and snacks at casual restaurants nearby. If you've got snorkelers in your group, just north of Dickenson Bay is Paradise Reef, a 1.6km-long (1-mile) coral garden. On the more exclusive southern coast, it's worth a drive to gaze upon the strikingly blue waters of Carlisle Bay: Against a backdrop of coconut groves, two long beaches extend from a bluff, and you can actually tell where the calm Caribbean waters meet the more turbulent Atlantic. East of here, at Half Moon Bay, you can see that Atlantic surf kicking up, and watch windsurfers skim the waters out past its reef; the reef itself protects the waters nearer shore, making it good for a family swim.
Photo Caption: Shoreline along Antigua.
In Spielberg's film (a blend of several original Tintin stories) author/artist Hergé's globe-trotting hero Tintin and his canine sidekick Snowy tumble through a series of adventures that are part Indiana Jones, part Pirates of the Caribbean. In the books, Tintin and Snowy visit the Congo, Tibet, China, Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union (Russia), South America, the Arabian Desert and outer space. But the journey for real fans begins in Brussels, which is a family- and budget-friendly introduction to Tintin's far-flung adventures.
The Belgian Comic Strip Center, a five-minute walk from the Grand-Place, is a great way to begin to explore the birth of Tintin and the back story of his Belgian born artist/author creator, Hergé. The Center, housed in a grand old art nouveau building, shows revolving exhibitions of Belgian comic strip history but always has something to delight Tintin fans such as the original paint pans and pencils Hergé used to bring his heroes to life and a life-sized Tintin astronaut statue. The Musée Hergé located in the Brussels suburb of Louvain-la-Neuve is a must for die-hard Tintinites. Although it's a trek to get here, fans of the original series and older children and teens won't want to miss the most comprehensive collection of Tintin-related art and artifacts in the world. The exhibits, including original art and scale models of ships, rockets and local flora and fauna that the artist used to imagine Tintin's world travels, range over multiple floors.
The Hotel Amigo located steps behind the Grand-Place is one of Brussels' most loved five-star hotels with staff and service that rival the Four Seasons. It's also a Tintin lover's dream with three new Tintin-themed deluxe rooms (one complete with its own rocket to the moon) and one deluxe Tintin suite that even has an electronic version of Marlinspike Hall's butler answering the room phone (rooms start at ¬319, the suite is tagged at €1,150 per night). The family package (¬293 per night in a classic room) offers kids' rooms free, a 50% discount on food for children under twelve, admission to the Hergé Museum for the whole family, a Snowy plush doll, a Tintin walking map and interactive Tintin games and movies on PSP and Wii for each family room.
Photo Caption: Tintin mural celebrating the opening of "The Adventures of Tintin" movie in Brussels, Belgium