Sometimes it’s hard to convince people that there is a lot more to the Sunshine State than Disney and beaches (although those do have their charms.)

After writing a Family Travel blog post about seeing manatees in Florida at Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, I remembered another Citrus County landmark nearby - the Crystal River Archaeological State Park about 75 miles north of Tampa/St. Petersburg.

This is a pre-Columbian Native American ceremonial complex where you can still climb up some of the six mounds on the property. 

The lush vegetation and feathery gray Spanish moss hanging off of everything give it a vaguely spooky air (and you’d better have bug spray in hand or be chewed alive, since it borders a marsh.) There’s a small interpretive museum on site, with a video theater, artifacts and park Ranger assistance.

Also near Homosassa is a remnant of Florida’s plantation and sugar-production heyday, the Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins Historic State Park. 

David Levy Yulee was Florida’s first U.S. Senator, the first Jewish person elected to the Senate and an important railroad man.

His sugar plantation operated here (with slave labor) from 1851-1864, and much of the mill equipment is still intact. 

Preservation work was in progress when I visited, and there are special park Ranger educational programs available if you call ahead.

While you’re in the area, look for one of the many roadside fruit and produce stands; you should be able to find something local and yummy at any time of year.

Here are this week’s travel tips and links round-up, sorted by continent for easier surfing:

North and South America

**  How about the excitement of bullfighting without the gore?  You can find it during a weekend at California’s Academy of Tauromaquia, or bullfighting school.

**  Someday I’m going to see it in person:  Carnival in Brazil.   Or I could check out couchsurfing and doing the tango in Uruguay, like the 4-Hour Workweek guy Tim Ferriss.

**  Now this is how you live the dream - Bruce Smith blogs about cruising the Caribbean, with an emphasis on great beach bars.

**  Hard to believe, but spring is coming, so I wrote a short article for education.com about great US botanical gardens for kids (and grown-ups, too.)

**  Cruising, fly-fishing and generally having a blast (with a few exceptions) in Chile.

**  One of the best design schools in the US is the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, RI, and you can even shop for artsy goodies in their school store.  I have my own 10 reasons to visit Rhode Island.

**  If you’re stuck in a plane on a New York state tarmac for hours, you now have a few rights thanks to a just-passed law. 

**  Visit Portland, Oregon for book heaven - the Heathman Hotel’s lending library for guests.

Asia and Australia

**  To go or not to go?  Thoughts from the UK’s Guardian on visiting Burma and who is really hurt by a travel boycott.

**  The Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre just opened in New Zealand (here on the PT Blog, Antonia had some thoughts about Hillary and how he inspired all of us to do more than just travel.) They probably won’t hang any bras or underwear on the building, though.

**  A photography enthusiast?  You should check out our man Steve Davey here at the PT Blog, or you can go on one of Ewen Bell’s in-depth photography tours in China, India, Thailand or his Silk Road tour.  Wow.

Africa

**  Thoughts on the volatile situation in Kenya: 

• danah boyd, tech thought leader and PhD candidate, blogs about mobile phone credits as currency in Kenya.
• A guest post by Ellen Petry Leanse on marketing guru Guy Kawasaki’s blog - We got out of Kenya, but what about the people who live there? 
• The Budget Travel blog on rethinking travel to Kenya.
• And video tech expert Robert Scoble answers the question: why don’t tech bloggers write about Kenya?  The answer is personal connection.

Europe

**  Smarter Travel brings us how to be a fashionista in Paris without high prices.  While you’re there, check out this unique tour that highlights the special relationship between African-Americans and Paris.  Gaping Void cartoonist Hugh MacLeod nails it with his recent cartoon about the artist’s life in Paris.

**  What fun: brewery hopping in the Czech Republic.

**  Are you a fan of the new Sweeney Todd movie?  TimeOut and Warner Brothers have put together a free downloadable Sweeney Todd’s London audiowalk.

General/Worldwide

**  We had a couple of posts featured in recent editions of blog carnivals.

• Mexican Pop Spot hosted the Carnival of Cities last week and included the PT Blog post about the Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum plus a post about 25 simply amazing mosques around the world, more good advice about hostels and a winter’s day at dramatic Point Reyes National Seashore (north of San Francisco.)
• Less Than a Shoestring has started a series of blog carnivals, organized by continent, so I also sent the Raumen post to their Travel on a Shoestring Asia/Australia carnival.  Included in this edition was advice on saving money if you plan to attend the Beijing Olympics.  

**  From Gadling:  Hire a local to be your travel buddy.  Not available in all cities, but you can often find a variation, like the Big Apple Greeters in New York or Cicerones de Buenos Aires.

**  Fodor’s uncovers some cool art hotels around the world, including one in San Francisco that I may have a chance to enjoy during the BlogHer 2008 blogger’s conference in July.

**  The American Red Cross Safe and Well program can help you keep loved ones informed of your status in case of emergency.  Hat tip to Lifehacker.

**  Wow, hostels are opening that aren’t backpacker dumps!  Of course, if you do end up on the hostel circuit, don’t miss Leif Pettersen’s hilarious Definitive Guide to Hostel Etiquette, which includes #5: “Do not have loud sex in the room while everyone is asleep and if you do, don’t get mad and demand “privacy” when the rest of us sit up and bemusedly watch.”

**  Finally, the UK’s Times Online lists four cities that “do winter properly:” Boston, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Vilnius.  What, nothing south of the equator?

It seems that cold places really are getting more space in our travel, and, unfortunately, pointless tourism. In the new Jan/Feb 08 issue of Perceptive Travel, Marie Javins has one of the most excellent essays I’ve ever read about the disappointment encountered when trying to experience the soul-thrilling empty ice of Antarctica. When a fellow passenger prods her to count how many countries she’s been to (”C’mon. Everybody knows. Don’t pretend you haven’t counted” has got to be the best distillation of the much-argued difference between tourists and travelers I’ve ever read) she realizes that the once-in-a-lifetime encounter she’d been hoping for is lost among the 37,500 tourists who ticked Antarctica off their lists that year.

Antarctica is a place I, too, have dreamed of going to. But after reading Javins’s essay, I’m more inclined to wait and follow some of her recommendations on how not to see the ice as one of thousands of tourists.

In addition to stories on a desert survival school in Utah and traveling up the river in Borneo, this issue also has David Lee Drotar traveling across Arctic Finland not by plane train, and automobile, but by snowmobile, snowshoe, dogsled, icebreaker ship, and reindeer sleigh.

And Fawzia Rasheed de Francisco has a very funny essay of particular interest to me as a new parent: is it really that hard to travel with kids? What are the drawbacks? What are the phantom fears? And what happens to all those happy life-in-my-rucksack twenty-somethings when they have kids? It can’t be that scary or difficult. After all, she points out, children do live in most parts of the world. Which made me ready to start thinking about my son’s first trip once he’s well enough to fly.

And kudos to Perceptive Travel magazine, which published Amy Rosen’s article “How to Build an Igloo (at 40 Below),” which won a First Prize from the North American Travel Journalists Association.

Day before yesterday I received a call from an old friend named Bethany Bell, someone I hadn’t heard from in over five years. I’d been thinking about her just the day before, too, while idly watching BBC America’s nightly newscast and hearing her reporting from Jerusalem during George Bush’s visit there.

Over the last couple years, I’ve listened with idiotic pride (and sometimes worry) every time I heard Bethany’s voice coming over the BBC or NPR from an empty Austrian valley and the recent bombings in Lebanon. Because, you see, it always reminds me of sitting with Bethany in a coffehouse in Vienna, almost ten years ago now, when she was working thanklessly at Austrian Radio (ORF) to train herself for possible BBC entry, and I was loathing my first job at an English-language newspaper. She talked about her frustrations with the process of breaking into an industry, and the need to be somewhere where things are happening; and I talked about my feelings that me and journalism weren’t a great fit.

And we both talked a lot about Viennese life and the 15,000-strong ex-pat community that felt sometimes like going to a small high school. Vienna’s not a welcoming city — a beautiful one, yes, with a quality of life that is hard to beat, but not one where a foreigner ever feels truly at home. The ex-pats end up forming their own societies, introducing their own cultures, and going to one another’s potluck dinners.

Being an ex-pat is a subset of the traveler’s life that I value above all other experiences. There is no travel that can’t be outdone by spending a year or more acquainting yourself with local bus routes and finally cajoling a smile out of the woman behind the meat counter at the local supermarket.

Bethany called to congratulate us on the birth of our son, and to talk about how good it would be to see each other again. But her lovely British accent made me think less of what my life is now, and more about what it was and where it’s gone. The memory of sitting in one of those high-ceilinged coffeehouses with a friend on a Sunday afternoon brought back others: the eternally sour-faced woman my husband and I named Frau Grumpy, who worked the bread counter across the street from our apartment; the fact that I still sometimes reach for an actual wicker basket when going grocery shopping; and most of all, that tremendous giddiness you get from the luxury of living in a different culture, of soaking it in and seeing how it can change you. It made me think about the fact that living as an ex-pat is not just an experience to write about or to pack away with your photos in the face of uninterested friends in your home country, it’s something that becomes part of who you are and how you view the world.

Just on the heels of that memory, a friend who just spent a year teaching English near Kyoto sent me a link to a new webzine she writes for: Nothing to Declare, a site started by ex-pats living in Madrid and written by those intimate with the trials and joys of living as an ex-pat.

As the writers on those site have found, the friends you make as an ex-pat are like no others in your life. They’re the ones who can show up on your doorstep after five or ten or twenty years, and you can chatter away as if nothing has changed. They’re the ones who can call out of the blue and make you laugh. Because what you share is not an early childhood or drunken university days, but a deep-seated interest in the world and thirst to know it.

In the U.S., there’s a saying usually ascribed to Native Americans about getting another person’s perspective by “walking a mile in their moccasins.”

As a traveler, it’s always interesting to see my country through another’s eyes.

As I scanned my local newspaper the other day, I noticed an Associated Press article in the Sports section about how Chicago is trying to convince international officials to pick their city to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Apparently Chicago’s international image is pretty much summed up by….the gangster Al Capone.

Industrial grit and grime. Violence.

This is not at all the city that I’ve visited, but when you live in a big country and travelers tend to cluster in well-known coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, it’s natural that a sprawling Midwestern place on Lake Michigan might tend to be overlooked.

In the AP article, Edinburgh resident Carol Morrison is quoted: “It’s much more visually stunning than I’d expected.”

Gosh, yes, Chicago is that.

I visited last summer with my teen daughter to speak at the BlogHer blogging conference, and even though I’d been there before, I was struck anew by the energy, verve, sports enthusiasm, beautiful parks and dazzling architecture.

If you like history and amazing buildings, I strongly recommend the 90 minute docent-led Chicago Architecture Foundation river cruise (what, you didn’t know that Chicago has lovely rivers? See, you should visit….)

The museums alone could keep a visitor tied up inside for days.

For a hard look at press freedom and freedom of speech in general, there’s the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum. For mind-blowing beauty, there’s the Art Institute of Chicago (I was crushed that Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks was gone when we visited….it was on loan to the MFA in Boston.) For T-Rex-sized portions of natural history, there’s the Field Museum.

Inside “the Loop,” the main downtown area, I was never concerned about my personal safety, even at night.

Some parents might be horrified, but my teen walked from the Navy Pier to the Field Museum on her own, and I never worried about her.

Sorry, Al Capone and assorted gangsters no longer rule Chicago.

Poke around in the Chicago Tribune’s travel section for plenty of visitor fun in what we call the Windy City or the City of Big Shoulders.

And if you plan a trip to any country, always try to explore a little bit beyond “the usual” places….and don’t rely on a city’s reputation from the 1920s.

(This is cross-posted on the Family Travel blog.)