Welcome to this edition of the Carnival of Cities, and to the Perceptive Travel blog.

After you explore the world through the Carnival, please wander around our blog; if you like what you see, we invite you to subscribe.

Next week’s host is Go Green Travel Green, so turn in your submissions by noontime next Tuesday, 29 July. If you’d like to host the Carnival on your own blog, contact me: sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com. Thanks!

Cities in the Americas

Washington, DC, USA   Jon Rochetti gives some background about V-Mail for Victory at the National Postal Museum at The DC Traveler – Washington DC travel & tourism information, saying, “During World War II, V-Mail or Photomail was used to cheaply transfer letters from soldiers to home. Now, the National Postal Museum has an exhibit of V-Mail samples and how it all worked.”

New York, New York, USA   GrrlScientist presents My First Serious Job Offer in Literally Years (and it’s not at all what you’d think) on her blog Living the Scientific Life, saying, “Once upon a time, on a bright sunny morning in NYC….”

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA   Nick did some research into Most and Least Walker Friendly Cities: Rankings at the EcoFuss Green News blog, noting that “Minneapolis is crowned as the most walkable city, based on recent rankings that score the walkability of top US cities.”

San Diego, California, USA   amanda s says that although the service is spotty and the wait tends to be long, Sushi Deli One and Two are good spots to try. She writes Staying Classy in San Diego, Local’s Guide for Things To Do.

Chicago, Illinois, USA   Ms. Smarty Pants presents An Almost Free Summer Tuesday in Chicago because, as we know, Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All.  :)  I particularly like her free concert ideas.

Houston, Texas, USA   I wrote this post about spending time with my son at the Houston Children’s Museum over on the Family Travel blog.

Buenos Aires, Argentina   Michael tells us how the young girls go for the glitter in his post How to Be Barbie for a Day: The Opening of the Casa de Barbie at his blog Michael Emilio.

Boston, Massachusetts, USA   Liz Lewis writes about Green Eating: Boston Restaurants (with a bonus video on using restaurant fryer oil to power a truck) on her blog Traveling the Green Way.

San Luis Obispo, California, USA   Beth Blair, one of the four rip-roaring Traveling Mamas, covers a lot of bases in Family Fun: San Luis Obispo.

Chicago, Illinois, USA   James Hills presents Rock & Roll, Video Games and Uber Chic? It’s Hotel Sax Chicago!  It was a fun read (he says, “This is an awesome Chicago hotel … perfect for mancations”) but what’s up with that photo of the hotel lobby - do guys really like decorating in Modified Brothel?!  James writes Man Tripping - Guy’s Getaways and Mancations.

Nancy Brown presents Carmel Revealed: A Local’s Perspective posted at the Uptake Blog, saying, “While I don’t live in Carmel yet…this is where I’d like to live, eventually.” Well, after reading her post, who wouldn’t?

Cities in Europe

Dublin, Ireland   Sean has all the details on the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, posted at My Secret Ireland.

Liverpool, United Kingdom   Naomi presents Liverpool Celebrates Beatles Day (and gets some Russian Beatles fans in the comments) on her blog Diary From England.

Bojnice, Slovakia   Karen Bryan is certain that Slovakia’s Bojnice Castle beats Cinderella and she explains why on her excellent Europe A La Carte Blog, saying, “Bojnice Castle in Slovakia is the archetypical fairy tale castle.”

London, United Kingdom   Mircea helps visitors get their arms around a sometimes-overwhelming city in the post 8 things to do in London;  It’s on the Travel Guides blog.

Multiple Cities But I Loved It Anyway

City Bookstores   ivanisko presents the Top 5: Central Europe at the unique Bookstore Guide, saying, “These are our top 5 bookstores selling books in English in Central Europe. The cities on this list include Budapest, Bratislava, Prague and Krakow and their local bookstores we like the best.”

That concludes this edition, and thanks for visiting.

Please submit your (single, non-spammy, only-focused-on-one-city) blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities, using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of cities, blog carnival.

Just after I took my then nine-month-old son on his first flight and first trip overseas, a friend gave me a copy of Travelgirl magazine, which she’d just discovered. “Look!” she said, pointing to the cover. “ABCs of flying with babies!” A bit late for me, I didn’t say. But I read it anyway, thinking it might have tips for future trips. And, boy, was I annoyed. I like Travelgirl, I really do, but how could they print an article that recycled conventional wisdom so blatantly? Not only were there no original ideas in the article (except for the tip of keeping a travel journal of notes, plans, and boarding cards for when your baby grows up — not to quash the author, but that’s just the sort of time-wasting clutter creator I don’t have time for and my boy probably won’t care about; that’s what cameras are for), some of them were just plain bad advice.

I don’t want to pick on Travelgirl. This isn’t the first place I’ve seen the same chirpy guidelines, and so much of it is useless in practical situations. So in response to all the flying/traveling-with-babies advice that’s been foisted on the public, I’d like to expand and explain some conventional advice to make it more useful, and debunk other bits. Here’s my take on the top 5 issues when traveling with a baby:

1. Nurse or bottle-feed during take-off and landing. Great advice, which you can get by squinting half an eye in any direction. Everyone says this. But what they don’t go into is what is meant by “take-off and landing.” Seems simple enough, but you and I know that sometimes the approach to a major airport can take up to 40 minutes. Being a lactivist and breastfeeding advocate, I was happy to let my boy John chomp on me during the crucial time. But then, you know (or you might not), after about 10 or 15 minutes you run out of supply. This could be true of bottles, too, and in either case you can’t force a baby to drink for 20 minutes or 40 minutes or however long it takes. They just won’t do it.

After the first couple tense sessions, when my ears were still popping and the boy was crying, I stopped to chat with a friendly British Airways flight attendant on the way off the plane. Yes, she said, my instincts were correct. It’s not during take-off and landing that matters so much — it’s actually the time when the air pressure changes. No captain or attendant is going to tell you exactly when that happens, but your ears will. So instead of waiting for the moment of liftoff or descent, I just started nursing whenever my ears complained of air pressure change. It worked. And if I ran out of milk, I had him suck a bit of water from a bottle. The important thing is that the baby is swallowing, relieving the pressure just like adults do.

As a side note, if you love to travel and are having a baby, choose breastfeeding. No bottles, no mess, no formula, no fuss. Baby’s food is always on tap. If you’re nervous, buck up by checking out Sheila’s post about nursing on her Family Travel blog. I breastfed John all over Europe, and, since America seems to be unique in its squeamishness about seeing babies suck on boobs, I didn’t even have to bother dragging out a nursing shawl.

2. Cheerios are a parent’s best friend. This blithe statement flies smack in the face of the World Health Organization’s advice that many babies should avoid wheat until at least a year old. Advice like this can be dangerous. Do your research and consult your pediatrician. My family has a history of celiac disease (gluten/wheat allergy), so I have to be careful when I introduce wheat to my kids. Without such a history, some parents are advised to introduce it earlier. Cheerios also contain soy protein, another common allergen.

If, like my family, Cheerios aren’t on your menu, you need other options. When packing emergency in-flight or layover or stuck-on-the-tarmac-for-4-hours snacks for your baby or kids, look for wheat-free and gluten-free cereals, often sold at natural food stores. Ask around. I’m told Trader Joe’s carries gluten-free Cheerios-type cereal. The Wholesome Baby Food website has a list of most and least allergenic foods for kids and babies. I also find that Earth’s Best organic food in 4-ounce jars travel relatively well and are easy to stuff down a hungry gullet in less than ten minutes (regarding on-plane liquid limitations, I just insisted they were solid food, which they are. Sort of).

3. To keep your kids happy, bring all their favorite toys! Well, that’s just silly. And it’s also exactly what I did. My little John doesn’t own a whole lot of toys, enough to fill half a plastic sack, so of course I brought them all. To keep him happy on the plane, or while we were eating long lunches or strolling through museums. And what happened? He played with one. Sometimes. Absentmindedly. Because it hinged onto his stroller. Unlike adults, unless their brain development is poisoned with television, babies don’t need entertainment. Life is entertainment. You know what John did while we were having long lunches? He played with table napkins. On the plane he flirted with the flight attendants and chewed on a blanket. In museums, gasp, he looked around. At everything. Skip the toys. Bring one or two favorites if your tot is old enough to miss them.

4. Stick the car seat in checked baggage. Leaving the car seat behind isn’t a great option unless you’re sure you’ll never be in a car. Besides, the Federal Aviation Administration may soon implement rules requiring that infants fly in their own car seats. Until then checking it or not is another question. We checked ours, and of course neither it nor the stroller appeared at the other end until 24 hours after we arrived. We hummed and hawed and finally packed John in the Ergo Carrier (which I love because, besides being built with a weight-distributing waist belt like a really good backpack, it has a hood that snaps up to keep a head from flopping around when baby is sleeping), pulled the hood up to give his head extra security, and belted us both in the back seat of a cab. Car seats are good, but I come from the generation whose mothers used to drive without seat belts and held us on their laps in the car. You make do and mostly everything turns out okay. Besides, we got caught out one night during a transportation strike and had no option but carrying him in a cab, and of course the seat was back in the hotel room.

5. Leave the stroller behind. You’ll find a lot of support for this, including from our own esteemed Sheila, my own family travel guru. After much thought — and much arguing with my husband before leaving for our trip — I decided that it comes down to what sort of traveling you do and what your comfort needs are. Sheila, wisely, advises leaving the stroller and packing the sling, buying a simple umbrella stroller at the other end if absolutely necessary, which is great advice, especially when you’re focused on packing light. My husband actually referred to Sheila’s blog to argue his point in favor of packing the umbrella stroller we have instead of the bright green sporty Phil & Ted’s thing that’s built like an SUV and weighs about as much.

I dug my heels in. I’m good at doing that. So is he, but since he was going to be attending a conference and I’d be out in Rome and Vienna by myself with the baby, I won. We brought the lime monstrosity. And I never regretted it for a moment. Sure, there were points. Getting it on and off buses and trams was something of a pain. But a woman traipsing around by herself with a flirtatious baby boy? You think people don’t help you? Ha!

You see, I’m a walker. I can walk for hours, especially in a foreign city. I’m happy to carry the baby in my Ergo Carrier or a sling, and did so my very first day in Rome. But after a certain point (3 hours) the following things came to mind: 1) he was hot and uncomfortable and wanted a change of position, 2) I was hot and uncomfortable and wanted to sit down and have a beer without feeling like I was pregnant with a baby elephant, 3) without a stroller with the handy compartment underneath, I had to carry the diaper bag, which was heavy and would eventually give me scoliosis, 4) digging for the neck pouch to extract money reminded me of certain impossible positions in my yoga class, and 5) John found his flirting much encumbered by being stuck so close to a woman’s face all day.

The umbrella stroller would have had similar issues, especially with regards to the diaper bag. Yes, I know you can use a backpack for a diaper bag, but why walk around geared up like I’m getting ready to shoulder through Rocky Mountain backcountry when I could just plop the diaper bag, water bottles, sling, rain cover and accumulated souvenirs in the little bucket underneath the big green stroller seat? That way I didn’t feel like a Michelin man and I had the option of putting him in the Ergo when he felt like being carried.

But the main point in favor of the three-wheeled monstrosity came through when I was tooling around Rome’s ancient ruins. That morning, I’d met a few other mothers who were regretting leaving their real strollers behind. “This umbrella, it’s useless on cobblestones,” said one German woman from Berlin. “She just bounces around and is uncomfortable.” When I got to Ancient Rome, I didn’t find cobblestones — more like cobbleboulders. I just ran the front wheel through them like the stroller was on a mogul slalom course and John was happy. He was even happier when, able to broadcast his smile widely from his green throne, swarms of teenage Italian girls stopped us twice and insisted on having their picture taken with him. Doubt he would have been so lucky if, sitting in a sling, they would have had to include me in the photo-op.

On top of that, I took him on two 6-mile walks through hills and farmland in Austria, and my stroller was sturdy enough to handle it. “See?” I kept poking at my husband when I got back. “Told you so.”

There you have it, my highly prejudiced take on baby travel. But my biggest piece of advice is this: don’t worry about it all. You might be concerned about where you’ll change your baby, where you’ll feed her, how she’ll sleep, if she’ll get bored … forget it. It all works out. You can change her on the grass. You can feed her anywhere. Given enough walking around and a caring parent, she’ll sleep just fine. And babies don’t get bored. They’re adaptable, a lesson to us all.

Hearing that the Taliban were destroying hundreds of religious statues and temples in Afghanistan in 2001 was a life changing moment for photographer Tito Dupret. Their actions inspired him to document UNESCO’s World Heritage sites in QTVR panoramas. And it has turned into his life’s work. For the past seven years, he has been on the road, traveling from one amazing location to another, camera in hand, determined to create panographies of each and every World Heritage site. So far, 253 of his panographics are posted on the WHTour site that he has been creating.

Panography is what he does and he is good at it. So if you fancy a visit to a World Heritage site but don’t have the time or the money to physically get there, go 360 with Tito instead. It’s the next best thing to being there yourself.

I’ve just been visiting Nubia in Egypt. I stood outside Abu Simbel and did the 360, looking first at the monuments, turning slowly towards the sea. I looked down at sand and up to the towering monuments. I zoomed into and out of the scene as I pleased, like I was holding the camera myself. It truly felt like I was there.

WHTour is one site not to be missed.

So excuse me while I head back there again. It’s time to go inside Abu Simbel…

But first, I’m going to sign up and become a member of WHTours. That way, I can get full screen access to all of the panoramic photographs plus be notified when new panographies appear.

And if you want to know more about the project and the photographer, then have a read of these two interviews:

An Update on World Heritage Traveler and Photographer Tito Dupret

A Conversation with Tito Dupret About His World Heritage Tour

Happy virtual traveling.

A few days back we posted the winners for our Remarkable Photo Contest running in Perceptive Travel. Follow that link to see the three champs and the honorable mentions, but here is the winning shot, which was picked in the top three by all of the judges.

This was shot by Lola Akinmade of Virginia, who is no slouch when it comes to photos. Here’s her blog and portfolio site. In the latest “it’s a small world” evidence, she has also done articles for GoNomad and Transitions Abroad.

Want to win something yourself, real easy? Follow this link to win two books from Rory MacLean, or follow the directions on the Perceptive Travel home page to get a free t-shirt.

When getting ready to travel, most of us pull out a map to get our bearings. It’s usually a map of the world, of a continent, a country, a state, or a city and we use it to figure out where we are going, how to get there, and what to do once we are there.

But sometimes you just want more from your map than simple geography and location. 

That’s where specialized maps fit in.

For example, interested in finding out what’s green where you are going?

Then check out the Green Map System.

Created by local mapmaking teams around the world, The Green Map System provides an amazing collection of information at the click of the mouse. You can explore hundreds of green maps from over 50 countries, each of which highlights a community’s natural, cultural and sustainable resources such as recycling centers, heritage sites, community gardens, toxic waste sites and socially conscious businesses.

Or prehaps you want to find out about the location of specific diseases.

Well, now you can thanks to Healthmap.

Healthmap gathers text from the World Health Organization, Google News, and many other resources and filters it down and puts it onto a map for everyone to see. Never has disease tracking been so accessible. Healthmap displays the outbreaks on a world map, color coding the severity of the outbreak based on current and up-to-date news reporting.

Seems you can find a map about anything, if you know where to look…