There’s enough to do in Lisbon to keep you occupied for weeks, but sometimes you just want a day trip out to the country. Enter Portugal’s world-class transportation system and a trip to one of the world’s most breathtaking mountainside villages: Sintra.

First the site of a precariously placed 8th-century Moorish castle, then a retreat for monarchs and a hideaway for monasteries, and celebrated by Lord Byron in his epic poem Childe Harold, the entire village of Sintra is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. About as romantic as you can get in our day and age.

But its lack of Moorish soldiers, court intrigues, and a swooning Byron (or a Byron being swooned over) in no way detracts from the mountain village’s beauty.

Exit the train to a quiet station decorated with the Moor-influenced, wildly colored tilework ubiquitous in the area. Start walking toward the rambling buildings poking out from the steep, green-swathed hillside. With their flamboyant decor and eclectic mix of architecture, the castles and halls are both majestic and whimsical.

It’s the walk up to that ancient Moorish castle that shows the true attractions of the place. The quickest and steepest way to the top is to leave the road for the botanical gardens, then up a narrow, nearly hidden set of steps that leaves you gasping for breath, and finally through an overgrown turnstile that leads to a path winding up the mountainside through a forest smelling richly of growing things.

The rebuilt 8th-century castle on the top of the mountain rambles over a tremendous view of the Portuguese coast. A building boom of skyscrapers, compared to the old, breathing forest at your back, shocks the landscape.

Down the back of the mountain, through the forest full of cinquefoil, elderflower, and a groundcover that looks like lily-of-the-valley, you spill out into the quiet rear end of Sintra near a stone seat cut into a roadside wall. It doesn’t look much used, but is backed by two rows of wave-patterned blue tiles and faces a public fountain where locals fill five-gallon jugs of water.

The streets are comfortable for a large dog, or maybe a pony — although in some places only a mountain goat would trip along easily — and ivy drips over stone walls. Near an ancient church, two mangrove trees with their foliage chopped off look like gnarled hands raised in offering or pleading to the gods. Michaelmas daisies grow in pink and white clumps from the roof tiles and sprout above your head from roadside walls.

It’s a place worth getting away to, with a two-hour hike well rewarded at the end in one of many cafes tucked into streets so steep the buildings look tipsy. Fresh tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and salt, a glass of Portuguese vinho verde, crusty slices of bread and a runny goat cheese — what more could you ask for?

Any guesses where this photo of my (then) preteen snowboarding daughter was taken?

It’s a giant indoor ski/snowboarding slope, with year-round snow.

Nope, not BigAir Fukuoka in Japan.

Nope, not SkiDubai in the Middle East.

Nope, not SnowPlanet in Auckland, New Zealand.

Of course!

It’s SnowWorld in Landgraaf, the Netherlands.

That’s right; the Dutch are the ones running the world’s largest indoor ski area.

A letter writer in a non-travel magazine I get has sent out a desperate call for advice. She’s a businesswoman who travels a lot, but who also has toddlers and babies at home. Her problem? She’s devoted to giving her kids breast milk, and is having a hard time finding places in airports where she can use a pump to express milk.

I don’t know how much play this issue gets in other countries, but in America breastfeeding has moved from a silent battle of wills to the forefront of what is idiotically dubbed “The Mommy Wars.” And there’s practically no place it’s more important than while traveling — whether traveling for work or pleasure, a mother’s got to feed her kids.

While the actual act of nursing has received increasing support, as demonstrated by the incredibly effective nurse-in lactivist conventions held in 2006 when an airline crew in Vermont kicked a breastfeeding mother off a flight for refusing to cover her baby with a blanket, there is very little space or opportunity given for women to express milk using a breast pump while traveling.

I won’t dwell on the overwhelming benefits of breast milk over formula (like the fact that formula-fed babies are at least twice as likely to suffer later from asthma, respiratory infections, and allergies; and breastfed babies have been shown to have score about 8 points higher on IQ tests). And as for breastfeeding while traveling, fellow blogger Sheila has a great post on her Family Travel site about how easy and stress-free it is. (Note: if Family Travel gives you a message that the internal links are borked, just type “lactivist” into the search function to find the post.)

What’s important here is that attaching yourself to a pump is really hard work. I had to do it for a month straight when my son was first born, and it’s no fun at all. It’s uncomfortable and time consuming; it requires more space than just popping the baby on (what my husband terms Glug-a-Jug, as if Hooters had opened a milk bar); it looks weird if you have to do it in public; and, if you’re stressed or pressured, it’s actually more difficult to produce enough milk to feed the baby when you get back home. And you have to do it every 3-4 hours or you’ll seriously regret it, which pretty much covers most check-in-and-wait times at major airports.

But women do it because they know how much their kids need it. Breast milk is, after all, the best nutrition on the planet. And it seems that societies that profess to put families and children foremost should provide places where a traveling mother can hide out in peace and quiet and pump away.

Public bathrooms don’t cut it. As my mother-in-law points out, parents shouldn’t even have to change their babies in those places, which are unsanitary and cumbersome. That goes double for pumping breast milk, when it’s essential that you keep the bottles and other equipment sterile.

I’ve done some searching since I read the woman’s plea for help, and have no good answers. Women are advised to make sure they have all their parts with them and pre-sterilized, and are cautioned to advise security that they’re sending a pump through because some nursing mothers have been stopped when their pumps looked like bombs. One woman says she just used the family restroom, but had to check both milk (in freezer packs) and pump and the pump ended up damaged.

Now that I’m looking to travel with a baby, I look at airports in a whole new light, and it seems to me that they are still overwhelmingly set up to cater to male business travelers and university students on their first I’m-discovering-myself-in-Cambodia backpacking tour. What I’d really love to see are worldwide airport branches of Mom’s Breastaurant (a kiosk that currently focuses on outdoor sports and fair-type events), but for now a clean, quiet room would do.

Are you ready for something new?

Sure, it’s great that the Louvre in Paris was the most-visited museum by a wide margin last year, but maybe you’d like to visit something on a more intimate, accessible scale (for example, we described Japan’s unique and wonderful Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum in a recent post.)

Here are some suggestions:

** Foynes Flying Boat Museum in Foynes, Ireland (near Shannon.) Not everyone used to arrive in Europe via the aggravating Heathrow airport; beginning with the July 1939 landing of Pan Am’s “Yankee Clipper” flying boat, this was the primary entrance point to northern Europe by air. My family and I enjoyed the exhibits and films, and my husband and I each sampled the trademark beverage that was supposedly invented here….the Irish coffee.

** The Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway houses anthropologist explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s original balsa wood raft that he and his crew sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific in 1947. I recommend reading Heyerdahl’s book about the voyage, which he made in order to prove that the ancient ancestors of South Pacific islanders could have come from South America on rafts, using the prevailing trade winds. It is also well worthwhile to watch the superb Academy Award-winning 1950 movie “Kon-Tiki,” shot onboard during the astonishing journey.

** Of course I recommend the “Big Daddy” Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing in Ocala, Florida, since I blog about the sport for Fast Machines. Garlits, driver of the famous “Swamp Rat” series of Top Fuel dragsters, has assembled an incredible array of automotive horsepower at his museum, plus a big selection of classic and antique cars and the Drag Racing Hall of Fame.

** Eyeglasses Museum/Brilmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This place is awesome if you’re like me and have worn glasses or contacts forever; I actually felt pretty hip when I left here. There is every sort of vision-correcting device that you can imagine, from many different eras, and I bought some pretty cool Sonia Rykiel frames there, too.

** Many people never see more of the Dallas-Fort Worth Texas metroplex than the enormous DFW Airport. They certainly don’t know about the spectacular art museums there like the Amon Carter, the Kimbell or the Tadao Ando-designed Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. What they might expect, and would most definitely enjoy, is the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, dedicated to the trailblazing women of the American West.

** Edo-Tokyo Museum. “Edo” is the old name for “Tokyo,” and this museum captures many different historical periods in this sprawling Japanese city, including temples and apartments. The main indoor museum has wonderful re-created street scenes and exhibits, but there is a branch in western Tokyo called the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum that has many more buildings and artifacts. The Web site is in Japanese, but Metropolis Tokyo (sort of like Time Out) has a great description of park highlights. Japan-Guide.com lists other open-air museums in Japan.

** In Flanders Fields Museum in Ieper/Ypres, Belgium. “In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row….” This is a superb museum about the impact of World War One in this part of Belgium and Europe as a whole. The famous poem was written near here by Canadian John McCrae, who was killed not long after he wrote it.

** Chocolate Museum/Schokoladenmuseum in Cologne/Köln, Germany. On the banks of the Rhine River, not too far from the striking Dom (cathedral) you’ll find a chocolate fountain, exhibits on the history and geography of cacao production and a mini-production line where you can watch workers make goodies like life-sized chocolate soccer balls. Yes, there’s a great gift shop, and a nice cafe as well.

** If you can tear yourself away from the Chinese city’s frenetic energy and shopping, pay a visit to the Hong Kong Museum of History on the Kowloon side. Nicely organized and visually impressive, it gives visitors a comprehensive look at the city’s origins and development.

** National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio tells the story of the Underground Railroad; a secret series of houses and churches that hid fugitive US slaves on their way north to freedom. Some of the hiding places can be seen today, but many are in private homes, so this dynamic museum on the Ohio River (including the child-friendly “Escape!” exhibit) is a great way to learn a lot in one place.

For more museum ideas….

• Frommer’s lists favorite small museums from 9 travel experts.

• More ideas over at Less than a Shoestring for cool museums you’ve never heard of.

• On Education.com, lesser-known US museums that are fun for kids, including the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina and the Museum of Work and Culture in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

Since Antonia started up a discussion on happy travel books versus disaster books (and Theroux’s premise that the best travel writing must come out of a survived disaster), I’d like to present exhibit A: The Geography of Bliss. I reviewed this already in Perceptive Travel’s book reviews, so I won’t repeat myself here.

With the tendencies of a manic depressant who can’t pick between highs and lows, the collective reviews for this book have been all over the place, to the point where it would be fair to wonder if people read the same title. World Hum went a bit bipolar on it as well, slamming it in a review and then running a lengthy interview with the author, Eric Weiner. But if it’s the readers that really matter, the book is a smashing success. It’s an odd kind of travel book to make the New York Times Bestseller list, but up there it is, top-10 in the non-fiction category. That just goes to show you that with the right kind of publicity attention, the unique will always win out over the also-rans.

One key aspect is that this is not just a travel book. It’s a quest for the meaning of happiness and an attempt to answer the question of why the people of some countries are blissfully happy overall and others are quite miserable. Being dirt poor doesn’t help. “The myth of the happy, noble savage is just that: a myth.” And democracy doesn’t bring happiness, but rather happy places are more likely to become democracies. “Which, of course, does not bode well for Iraq.”

There’s no easy answer to the meaning of happiness, which is what has seemed to irk some critics (hey, go get a self-help book if you want confident, black and white answers). That’s because it’s a complex issue. Money helps, but only to a point. Stuff is nice, until you have too much of it. Friends and family make a huge difference, as does turning off the office lights and joining them in the real physical world. But paradoxically, striving to reach goals makes some nations happier while others find bliss in setting the bar low—no unreasonable expectations.

My theory is that your personal opinion of this book will vary a lot depending on your personal view and state of happiness. The reasonably happy people who are reasonably content with the way their lives are going seem to like this book a lot. If you’re a grumpy curmudgeon like Paul Theroux, it’ll probably make you even grumpier—be warned. As the book finds, “Thinking about happiness makes us less happy.” If you aspire to be a writer though, read The Geography of Bliss as a great lesson in how to write well without lots of superfluous fluff, without showing off. Weiner is a radio correspondent, so he knows how to tell a story well without filling paragraphs with puffery. That made me happy, and perhaps you’ll be happy if I shut up now and end this post.