If the December holiday crazies are settling in for you, take a moment to grab a cup of your favorite comfort and surf around for some travel tips with PT….

**  We’ll start with some goodies from Europe:  there’s an instant weekend in Liverpool UK (where there’s more than Beatles nostalgia,)  top ice hotels in Sweden, Finland and Norway,  plans for a Berlin version of the London Eye giant sightseeing Ferris wheel (plus 10 wacky things to do in Berlin right now,)  surprises in Antwerp, Belgium,  getting to European ski resorts by train,  Frommer’s take on Wroclaw, Poland (pronounced “vrotts-wawff” and try to say that 5 times!) and a great beer tour in Brussels.

**  Is overseas travel too insanely expensive for Americans, with the current exchange rate?  It may be time to stop turning up noses at package tours, because you probably can’t beat them. That’s how I got my daughter and nephew to Hong Kong and Tokyo a couple of years ago without completely flattening my bank account (thanks Go-Today.com.)  I just sorted through hotel and airfare combos, then declined available tours since I could handle that on my own.

**  The Mayan ruins at Tikal, Guatemala was one of the most magical, “Indiana Jones”-ish places that I’ve ever visited.  I wish I could have written this article about Tikal in the New York Times.  There are also good things going on for travelers in Medellín, Colombia.  Really.  

**  I’m seeing more coverage of Africa in the mainstream media, like this encouraging BusinessWeek article about African entrepreneurship and this piece on a trip to Kampala, Uganda.

**  Check out Miami, Florida’s Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden for a new exhibit of Roy Lichtenstein sculptures and Dale Chihuly glass inside the gardens.  Also in Florida, quiet and solitude on Florida’s forgotten coast (and I can vouch for the Old Florida charms of the coastal town of Apalachicola.)  Did you know that inventor Thomas Edison had a laboratory in Fort Myers, Florida?  This is a nice time of year to see the holiday decorations at the Edison and Ford winter estates in southwest Florida.

**  The New York Times suggests 53 places to go in 2008, but then Arthur Frommer’s blog gives the list a real tongue-lashing for its elitist tendency to drool over luxury lodging. Budget Travel has 10 places to discover that are a lot more down-to-earth, including, yes, Wroclaw, Poland.

**  Hurray for big-city winter hotel deals in Chicago and San Francisco, from TravelZoo. If you’re a biker, there’s always the Iron Horse Hotel opening in summer 2008 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin;  how about an on-site bike wash, in-room gear storage racks and just steps to the Harley-Davidson Museum?

**  Speaking of big U.S. cities, here’s what’s going on right now in Los Angeles, according to Fodor’s.  Or you could stay small and enjoy a New England Christmas in pretty Mystic, Connecticut.

**  Thanks to the Fly Away Cafe blog for featuring our Round the world with music post in the December Carnival of Travelers.  The Carnival also had posts about salsa in Puerto Rico and music in the Blue Ridge mountains.  Art is the theme for the January Carnival.

**  Finally, some Web help for travel: a brief guide on how to use social networks to stay in touch while vagabonding, Matador’s top 10 Web sites for finding a cheap place to stay and the Web Worker Daily blog’s Web-savvy ways to make travel easier and cheaper.  Of course, even social networking news site Mashable gets sick of this Web stuff sometimes; here are the top 5 Websites of 2007 that they’re tired of.

Technorati tags:  travel, travel blogging, holiday travel

I bought this book for my husband, who seems to be seeking a path to sainthood during the first months of caring for a newborn. While I feed the insatiable child, my spouse has been cooking me breakfast in the mornings (this is the same creature who, when we first met in Scotland, used to come down to the dorm’s cafeteria every morning and stare at his mushy corn flakes for half an hour, waiting for his brain to get out of bed and catch up with him). Somehow I doubt it’ll last, but I’m trying to encourage it in any way possible, and Daddy Needs a Drink not only describes our life, the gift (and accompanying bottle of Stolichnaya) kept the humor and fried eggs coming for another week.

Robert Wilder’s book has prompted critics to say that, if David Sedaris had kids, this is the book he would have written. I differ only in that I think Wilder is a whole lot funnier than Sedaris. But maybe that’s because his essays so accurately reflect our life right now: the completely random sleep patterns, the inability to get anything done with a baby who hates being put down, and the joys of being a modern parent.

The peak of those joys, as my husband could attest, extends to the modern father getting lots of admiring looks, coos, and flirtation from women 18 to 85 while carrying a tiny sprog in a Baby Bjorn. The trough, Wilder paints vividly in “Papa Pia,” includes the squeamish looks given by guys in the men’s room at the local taco joint while you’re trying to change a squalling baby on a pad spread over three sinks, and she manages to fill her diapers twice and spray the mirror with explosive poop at least once during the process. That handy Koala Kare changer evidently doesn’t always show up in the men’s room.

Travel with children can be a neverending drama, as Wilder finds out when taking his two little ones back east to visit his family, even if the kids are good as gold. Flight attendants and fellow passengers positively drip praise over him, which leads him to wonder, rightfully so, why it is that women don’t get the same kudos for herding children through airports and into bathrooms and onto planes without losing either the kids or their tempers.

And then he gets stuck behind the nightmare passengers, the middle-aged couple (nicknamed Bitchy McFrumpass and Baldy McAsswipe) who insist his son is kicking their seat (even though his legs couldn’t possibly reach—we should all be so lucky not to have our knees squashed). Air travel with small children, as we’ve discussed in earlier posts, is becoming an increasingly contentious issue as airlines shorten everyone’s patience with less leg room and more delays. Even well-behaved children get snapped at.

While back on the East Coast, Wilder runs into another aspect of modern life that usually doesn’t hit people until they’ve had kids: many of us raise our children a heck of a long way from where we grew up, and we’re sometimes surprised by the consequences. The reality hits Wilder when he takes his family to a seafood joint on the Atlantic, and his daughter gets flustered because the waitress doesn’t understand her requests for quesadillas. The scene reminded me of Adam Gopnik’s shock in his book Paris to the Moon, when he realized his son was growing up knowing nothing of baseball (I really didn’t like Paris to the Moon, so it’s not a fair comparison).

This is part of the ease of travel these days, that it’s so natural to settle somewhere far from our roots. We don’t always realize that, as easy as it is to fly home for a week or so, it’s a lot harder to give our children a sense of the place we grew up in, whether it’s (in Wilder’s case) a love of seafood and cream sauces in Connecticut when you live in a Mexican food mecca, or (in my husband’s case) teaching your son cricket in the thick of Yankees versus Red Sox country.

Daddy Needs a Drink is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Whether you’re a parent or not, it makes great airplane reading. (In my case, great “trapped on the sofa with the baby who needs to be Velcroed to me” reading.) Highly recommended for keeping you sane when you’re stuck on the tarmac for an extra two hours and the kid behind you is singing “This is the Song That Never Ends” at the top of his lungs.

Yesterday NPR had one of the strangest travel stories I have yet come across — a new spa resort in North Korea. Mount Kumgang, North Korea, is an unabashedly consumerist and touristic resort built with money from Hyundai, and offers a retreat for South Koreans looking for natural landscape beauty as well as the normal amenities of a resort spa. That is, if you don’t mind going through the DMZ and skirting the land mines on either side of the road. “Just getting there involves busing through the demilitarized zone, where we are constantly told ‘no pictures, no pictures’ by our guide and informed that aside from the road we are on, the entire area is filled with land mines,” reports the CNN journalist who also made the trip. And if you don’t mind being entirely fenced in and heavily guarded from the local population.

The question is, why would the average South Korean make the trip? NPR producer Madhulika Sikka says that it’s often a symbol to South Koreans of what they see as the inevitability of eventual remerging of the two countries. And, of course, there’s always the true traveler’s answer: because it’s there.

Have you ever wondered what the ecological cost of the climate change conference in Bali is? Well according to Bloomberg.com, the estimated 10,000 activists jetting off there will have the same effect as 20,000 cars being used for one year!

Obviously the rampant stupitity and hypocrisy of this dilutes the message from the conference, and undermines the who notion of climate care, in much the same way as Al Gore’s electricity bill has given succour to those who seek to denigrate the message of his inconveniently dull film.

So what to be done, I hear you all cry. How can we save the environment if activists and politicians can’t jet off to a tropical island? Well the Guardian Online reports the work of One World UK who have set up a Second Life Virtual Bali conference, complete with avatars, who can grill representatives from the main conference in Bali.

So, with this cutting edge technology allowing active virtual participation in international conferences, why would so many environmental activists want to fly all that way to the uniquely-cultured, balmy, beach-fringed tropical paradise that is Bali? I can’t for the life of me think why!

© Steve Davey 2007

Just specially for the month of December, the New York Times has launched a new travel blog titled Jet Lagged: Navigating the Unfriendly Skies. Among several talented writers addressing the issues facing air travelers are the inestimable Pico Iyer, Ask the Pilot blogger and pilot Patrick Smith, and airline executive Michael J. Boyd.

This week, Iyer breaks down the myths about the golden age of air travel, saying, “I wonder if it isn’t really the democracy of travel that many of us are objecting to these days when we speak of more crowded planes and long lines at the airport. In my parents’ youth, after all, plane travel was a thing for the rich few. Starbucks outlets in the terminal; e-mail at 30,000 feet; frequent-flier programs that allow you, as I have done, to fly free to Easter Island, Paris and Cambodia: What is it, exactly, that makes us think that we should complain about sitting in a seat and being taken around the world?” And pilot Patrick Smith, revising some of his Ask the Pilot themes, lays down the real reasons for increased airline delays and why they aren’t going to get any better.

Keep up with Jet Lagged’s regular December postings for your holiday cheer.