Travel

The temptation of chocolate draws Chocoholics and chocolate connoisseurs to Brugge, Belgium in droves. Decadent, rich chocolate shops are beyond prevalent in this well-preserved Gothic city (there are over 40). A turn at every cobblestone corner will be yet another chocolate shop discovery. Belgium is second to none in the chocolate department. If you think Swiss chocolate is supreme, then try Belgian, and your mind will be forever changed. Here are just a few suggestions to indulge your chocolate cravings.

Dumon is a well-known family owned shop. Stefaan Dumon creates exquisite chocolates daily using fresh ingredients sans additives and preservatives. (The shelf life is six weeks.) The staff will go into great detail describing their award winning, decadent, exploding-with-flavor, creamy chocolates. It's customary to find a small crowd gathered around the chocolate display case.

To indulge in one-of-a-kind concoctions, head over to The Chocolate Line near Market Square. Eighty unique varieties, such as a Buddha-shaped ginger chocolate and a white elephant saffron curry will tempt your taste buds.

When my sons were young, we loved to read dinosaur books. They turned the pages pointing at the scary tyrannosaurs rex attacking a hapless three-horned triceratops or a silly looking long necked brontosaurus eating the leaves off a tall tree.

Wide-eyed, they asked the obvious question, "Are dinosaurs real?"

Those oddly shaped monsters didn't look like the lions, tigers, elephants and zebras we saw at the zoo. Without the fossil record, nobody would believe dinosaurs ever existed. Recently I was offered a tour of dinosaur sites in Utah, one of the best places on earth of view the fossil record. I jumped at the chance.

My journey back in time began with a trip to the Natural History Museum on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Opened in 2011, the stone colored building is built into the hillside as though it were an ancient creature only half-excavated. The museum focuses on the history of Utah so the creatures and artifacts on display came from excavations in nearby areas. Studies of the earth (geology) and long dead animals and plants (paleontology) can be difficult to understand.

Olympia is a charming little city in the Pacific Northwest, set down on rolling hills surrounded by forests of Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple and red cedar – a pretty, speckled egg resting in a nest of twigs.

This is the old part – the far end of the Oregon Trail, settled on Native American land by Europeans in the 1850’s – where Leopold Schmidt founded the Olympia Brewing Company in nearby Tumwater Falls and sold his beer, if you recall, with the slogan, "it’s the water," which I’m surprised none of the hundreds of water bottlers has adopted now that Leopold’s beer business has folded.

This is Downtown Olympia, with its century-old buildings, its perfectly-proportioned Capitol, its tree-lined streets on which people drive politely and you can always find a place to park – often without a meter – near the still-family-run bookstore or café or bike shop you want to go to.

But that’s not where I wanted to go, or rather needed to go, to help my son move into an unfurnished apartment.  We needed to head over to the other part of Olympia and it is this part – which I imagine you’d find outside most other American towns of its size – that I’m still trying to figure out as the plane banks over Puget Sound taking me home.

"If you are planning a holiday trip with your baby or toddler, make sure to plan ahead. Here are fifteen sure-fire ways to make traveling easy and fun."

1.    Before your trip, visit the dollar store and stock up on coloring books, paint with water books, and age appropriate toys for your toddler. And save them for a trip. There is nothing better than something new!

2.    If you have a small video player, stock up on age appropriate movies for your little one. Baby Einstein has some great videos for a younger baby.

3.    If you can plan your plane schedule around your child's nap time, your trip will be a breeze.

4.    When traveling on a plane, feed the baby while the plane is taking off and landing. This keeps the Eustachian tubes open so the baby’s ears won’t hurt.

5.    When traveling on a plane with a toddler, it's sometimes difficult to sit still during takeoff and landing. Give him a Sippy cup and some goldfish crackers and play a counting game with the crackers. It will be fifteen minutes of fun, instead of fifteen minutes of tantrums.