It’s relatively easy to fill your days on a family trip to San Francisco. Most don’t even need a guide book to put together the basic must see, must do list. But after you’ve walked on the Golden Gate Bridge, escaped from Alcatraz and jumped on a Cable Car, take the kids to Golden Gate Park.

Last winter my 7th grade daughter brought home information about the school trip to Washington, DC. She wanted to go, but said she’d rather do DC with the family instead of her friends. Once the shock wore off, I started planning almost instantly. Being organized is the key to exploring DC with the kids.

Plan Ahead & Reserve, Reserve, Reserve

Unless your kids are fans of waiting in long lines, do your homework. Have a family discussion, decide what you’d like to do and get busy …

Exploring places off the beaten path is one of my favorite things about traveling. But planning a family vacation with a tour operator makes that a little difficult. It’s hard for a destination to have that undiscovered, almost exotic allure when you’re walking in a group of 30 or more. Hard, but not impossible.

When we went on our family trip to China, Guilin amazed us all. It was the part of the tour that lead us to the Li River, in other words, tourist central …

It’s called the Sunshine State for a reason. Every year thousands of snowbirds flock to Florida to escape the cold winters that typically blanket the Northeast and Midwest section of the U.S. If you’re not familiar with the term, snowbirds are people, typically retirees, who have a second home in a warmer location. In other words, grandparents who seek sun.

It can be a dream come true for grandkids and oh yeah, their parents.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years (and for the sake of argument, let’s assume you haven’t), you know that iPhones and iPads are the best thing to happen to traveling parents since portable DVD players.

If you have one, lucky you!

Now all you need are a handful of high quality apps with good replay value to keep your kids busy and happy while traveling. Don’t have time to slog through the entire iTunes App Store looking for them? Here are a few of my favorites.

I read an article recently about the rapidly dwindling number of California sea otters (they don’t know why this is the case yet) that left me sad. As a native Northern Californian, I grew up appreciating our spectacular coastline from Monterey to Big Sur. This is home to the much-adored sea otter.

The Northern California Wine Country has a reputation for many fabulous things, but being family-friendly isn’t one of them. Wine tasting with kids is do-able, but different. And though wine is obviously the toast of the town, kids have a new, fast-flying reason to celebrate when they visit.

Move over grapevines, some towering Redwoods have a new view of wine country to share. Ziplining is a favorite activity in family vacation spots like Cabo San Lucas and Costa Rica. Now, the California wine country …

Traveling with kids is a practiced art. The more you do it, the better you get. Just when you think you mastered it, another curveball comes your way. That great little traveller you’ve taken to Paris and Spain, turns into a tween and all the rules change. It usually happens somewhere between 9 and 10 years-old, and you may not realize its happened until you’re on a plane halfway around the world.

Take a deep breath. The once traveling “givens” may have changed, but it’s not as bad as it might seem.

It’s good to be a kid these days.

Not that being a kid was bad when I was growing up, but being a kid now has perks that didn’t exist when my age was still written in single digits. Playgrounds had slides and swings, not rock climbling walls and carousels. We rode bikes, not electric scooters, and we listened to cassettes, not iPods.

In the past ten years there’s been an explosion of things just for kids. Think about it. Hotel kids’ clubs, kids’ menus and move over Louvre, kids’ museums.

My husband and I are not the biggest Disney fans. When it comes to a vacation, there are a lot of other places we’d rather take the family. That said, we understand why it would rank high on our kids’ list of places to go.

Our story goes like this. We were headed to Southwest Florida to visit family. My girls had seen Disney’s “Give a day. Get a Disney Day.” advertisement. Basically, anyone who volunteered for a day, got a free ticket to Walt Disney World or Disneyland.