Family vacation in Italy

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On Country Walkers’ private seven-day Cinque Terre circuit, families follow the Italian Riviera, hiking between hillside fishing villages and paddling beneath the cliffs that line the Ligurian Sea. An additional perk: refueling with cappuccino and handmade gelato at each rest stop.

“The villages are connected by footpaths and linked by boat, rail, and trail,” says Country Walkers’ Tricia Dowhan. “So you can walk two miles [three kilometers] every day—or eight [thirteen kilometers]. It’s easy to improvise.” Kids hike, but also love climbing aboard trains to transfer towns or go deep into the caves of the Gambatessa mines. After your arrival in Genoa, a local guide leads you on a trek through olive groves and chestnut trees to your seaside hotel in Monterosso al Mare. From there, you’ll catch a boat to neighboring Riomaggiore, where you can explore the ruins of a 15th-century castle. The trek back follows a series of steep pathways overlooking the sea. Afternoons are free for hiking terraced vineyards or snorkeling the Mediterranean.

Where to Play

Work up an appetite hiking, touring, and swimming, then do as the Italians do:mangia! Picky eaters won’t be a problem­—kids make the transition readily from Easy Mac to macaroni con formaggio while you savor fresh local fish and hand-rolled gnocchi. On your trek through the Appennines, stop at the cheese factory, flour mill, and bakery along the way to pick up fresh foccacia for your picnic lunch.

At Day’s End

Kids take a cooking class to learn how to bake a traditional Italian pizza or make their own gelato while you slip away to sample local vino.

Milan, Italy

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Fashionable Milan and the mountainous north could hardly differ more from teeming Naples and the arid, insular south, where the boot’s toe appears to nudge Sicily into the Mediterranean and a few grizzled Mafia dons still prevail. • In between, art in speechless abundance—Byzantine, pre-Renaissance, Renaissance—is everywhere. • As are food and wine, from sublime seafood to peerless pasta and pizza. • The Vatican regularly issues decrees on morals, yet only a small percentage of Italians regularly attend Mass. • The nation that gave us Machiavelli today offers a soap opera of politics, peopled by rogues and libertines.

best time to cruise

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ne of the most common questions we hear at Cruise Critic time and time again is this one: When is the best time for a cruise vacation to Europe (or the Caribbean, New England/Canada, Hawaii or Alaska)?

It’s a question whose answer depends on many variables — and so not an easy one, at face value, to answer. Fall-foliage enthusiasts, for instance, will find September and October the best time to take that Canada/New England cruise, whereas watersports lovers (and families) much prefer to sail the region in the summer when school is out and temperatures are warm for swimming.

So what factors influence your timing? Do you need to schedule around school breaks? Is a holiday week the best time for your reunion cruise? Is your main goal to escape frigid winter temperatures at home? Or, maybe, you have lots of flexibility (or a tight budget) and don’t mind making a few tradeoffs in timing for a steal on a cabin. Your answers will influence which season is your best bet to sail in.

For most cruise regions there are periods of peak demand (high season), moderate demand (shoulder season) and low demand (low season). Several years ago, high season tended to be when the weather was best in a particular area (and when all the northerners flocked to the sun), but as more and more families take to cruising, the summer months have become a peak-demand period regardless of the weather (at home or in the region). Families especially need to book high-season sailings as early as possible because some cruise lines limit the total number of children per sailing, and each ship has a limited number of cabins that can accommodate three or more people.

As for slow and shoulder seasons, you’ll find more bargain opportunities in year-round destinations. In places like Alaska, Europe and Bermuda (where you have a five- or six-month sailing season), the off season is typically a matter of weeks on either end of the season. And, for regions like the Panama Canal, and Northern Europe and the Baltics, almost all sailings are priced “in season.”

Low seasons have shrunk in many areas thanks to the boom in new cruising destinations and home ports, and the smart thinking of the cruise lines in repositioning ships to the places people want to sail and at the time when they want to sail them. As one cruise line representative said, “That’s the great thing about a cruise ship. We don’t have to sit and wait it out for the season to change; we can follow the sun and move the ships to where people want to go.”

The following is a list of cruising regions where you can still find some variability in seasons, along with the advantages and tradeoffs for sailing within each of them:

Best time to visit Antarctica

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When is the best time to visit Antarctica?  That is a pertinent question, because one can rely upon conditions to change somewhat during the southern Austral Summer season. The answer depends upon what one’s expectations are or what one really wants to experience. Ask any of the Lindblad Expeditions naturalists when is his or her favorite time and you’ll get several different answers.
     First of all, there really is no best time to travel to Antarctica. It is always exciting, adventurous, and awe-inspiring no matter what time of the Summer season we’re there. This is the biggest and most adventurous and most fulfilling voyage Lindblad Expeditions typically operates. Our expeditions to the Antarctic Peninsula generally run from late November into early March, while our Antarctic explorations that include South Georgia can start a little earlier and end a little later because the island lies outside of the normal ice zone and the breeding season lasts longer there. Many of our guests want to return to Antarctica and we always suggest they plan their visit for a different time of the season, if possible, because ice conditions change, activity at penguin colonies changes, concentrations of whales change, as well as other more subtle changes.
     Before deciding, perhaps one should prioritize one’s expectations. Ice conditions can vary tremendously throughout the season, as well as from season to season. There is no way to predict this much ahead of time, because winds and currents move pack ice around seemingly haphazardly. However, there are a few generalizations one can make. Early in the season is much better for finding fast ice, that is, sea ice that is still solid and connected directly to the shore. This creates very exciting opportunities to actually berth the vessel in the ice and get out and walk on it. This is usually only possible in the earliest voyages, because as the season progresses, temperatures rise and the ice thins, breaks up, and starts drifting about. Then, it’s definitely not safe to walk on.
     We have found that earlier voyages sometimes present us with more giant ice bergs within the inshore waters, as they have been frozen in over the Winter and not yet started drifting away from the continent. There are few things more wondrous than cruising near these magnificent behemoths. The Antarctic Peninsula, particularly the western side, is usually more ice-free during the latter part of the Summer. With less sea ice blocking access to shorelines, we often are able to do more exploring and can sometimes find new and exciting landing sites.
     Regarding the wildlife sites, earlier in the season, there tends to be more snow and more pristine conditions at the penguin colonies. The penguin eggs are just starting to hatch and the tiny, helpless chicks are incredibly appealing. It is always fun to watch the parents exchange duties at the nest site and feed their little, demanding chicks. As the Summer progresses, however, things become more energetic and frenetic as the chicks become larger, they’ve left their nests to form crèches, and are very active. By February, both parents can leave their chicks for longer periods of time and go to sea to procure food for them. The penguin chicks are at their peak now and are very inquisitive.
     Whales start arriving in Antarctic waters earlier than we do, but the mothers with calves are a bit slower and tend to arrive a bit later, so that the latter part of the season generally produces somewhat better whale watching opportunities, particularly the humpback whales, which have grown fat from many weeks of continuous feeding and may become more ‘friendly’.

awesome fiji

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Sena, Jenny’s assistant, escorts me to Nasea, a typical village set among mangroves on this distant shore, where a two-year-old teaches me a final, humbling lesson about this emerging nation. Kicking off my flip-flops to enter a modest concrete-block house, I’m invited to sit on the only chair and watch two grandmothers weave kuta mats. Outside, a child is wailing, but I’m not really paying attention. More women and children gather on the veranda, so we modestly sit cross-legged in oursulus and chat up a storm. My Fijian is limited to bula (hello) and vinaka (thank you), but the genuine welcome reminds me that polite hospitality is not exclusive to parts of the world with air-conditioning and crocheted doilies.

We all rise to follow another weaver, who wades into a stream to harvest an armful of green reeds. The crying starts again, and I begin to wonder what is wrong with whoever is bawling in the background. Finally, after thanking the village elders for a gracious morning, my growing entourage crosses the common lawn. Standing in front of one shack is a barefoot little girl named Laite. When I wave, her eyes go wide and she breaks into another howl, running full tilt in the other direction. Everyone in the village roars with laughter. As the ignorant outsider, I have no idea why this so funny. Then Sena tells me: “She has never seen a white person.”

Rare air indeed.

Fiji, the land of gods

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Jai finally drops me off at a jetty on the hilly northern coast near Vatu-i-Ra Passage. Dolphin Island caretaker Stanley Simpson arrives in a small outboard, tosses my luggage in the forepeak, and roars across to the 13-acre domain of Alex Van Heeren, who rents to weekly guests when absent at Huka Lodge, which he also owns, on the Waikato River, in New Zealand. Stanley’s wife, Dawn, stands on the stone dock. A Fijian mother hen, she clucks at my exhaustion and wrinkled attire. We walk under cool frangipani and jacaranda trees to a tobacco-stained bungalow with a wraparound veranda, downy sofas, and a dining table. She brings out cold tea and says with a laugh, “Lots of ice! I know Americans like lots of ice.” While she preps mud crab in fresh coconut-cream curry, I gratefully shower in the sleeping pavilion next door. A black-and-brown tapa (mulberry bark) mural hangs above the bed, where I collapse shortly after sunset.

The next morning, I paddle a kayak around the bay. When the tide turns, I hike across the island’s steep side to a bluff above Bligh Water. A coconut-frond hut has a daybed and a sheet-metal fan that operates by pulley. This primitive camp becomes my favorite hangout until the mosquitoes discover me. Returning to the main bungalow, Dawn plays my Best of Al Green CD on the stereo while I watch her pat roti dough by hand. (She and Stanley were born on different islands but share a love of Indo-Fijian curries.) I depart for the mainland with her recipe and a jar of homemade mango marmalade tucked in my bag. Impulsive gestures of friendship are easy to find here.

The dusty town of Nadi has a main drag of tourist shops and an outdoor market, where vendors fan themselves behind piles of spices, breadfruit, and kava root. Since it’s also the airport hub, I have to retrace my steps here to reach the outer islands. At a ticket counter for the country’s sole seaplane charter operation, I get a headache from the Canadian-born bush pilot who wants a fortune to fly me to Vanua Levu. I balk until Jenny Leewai Bourke, owner of Nukubati, arrives with her luggage and her friend, Mitimiti Dreunimisimisi. “The air is different up there,” says Jenny, when I ask why I should explore Fiji’s second-largest island. “You won’t regret it.” Bourke grew up in Labasa, on Vanua Levu’s northern coast, and married an Irish-Australian fashion designer. “My children are fruit salad,” she says with a laugh, using local slang for multinationals. As the seaplane climbs over a mountain range, where the rain forest hides white-water rivers and tiny farming outposts, I adjust my internal slide rule to a new perception of far, far away. We glide to a stop in the lagoon next to Nukubati Island, where Jenny has built a seven-room resort on a 50-mile coastline unmarred by electricity or indoor plumbing. (Nukubati runs on solar power and generators; rainwater is captured in cisterns.) She barters diesel for fresh fish, grows papaya and yams, and hires women from nearby villages to weave floor mats for a plantation-style lodge filled with dog-eared books, rattan furniture, and Fijian art. My guest cottage has a thatched-roof porch and a fan-cooled bedroom. It faces west on a mocha beach where blue jellyfish occasionally get stranded and, in keeping with the island ethos, become compost for the vegetable garden.

After the hot and sticky plane ride, we sit down to lunch as Justin Hunter and his wife, Leanne, arrive, having driven an SUV for three hours on red-dirt roads from their pearl farm in Savusavu Bay. He opens a briefcase to show us precious golden, sea-green, and blue-black gumballs. A marine biologist with a degree from the University of Washington, Hunter worked at Natural Energy Labs in Hawaii before returning to his childhood home. Since the pearls are beyond my credit limit, he gives me two luminous oyster shells. After devouring freshly caught octopus cooked in coconut milk, we spend the late afternoon lolling on an anomalous sand spit that emerges inside the Great Sea Reef. In full dress, Jenny and Mitimiti wade into the lukewarm sea. Unlike the crystal lagoons surrounding the south coast of Vanua Levu, this bay is murkier with nutrients. Jenny feels around a coral head and pulls out a red-and-black sea cucumber, which looks strikingly like a penis. So this is what Benjamin and Mary Wallis crossed oceans to hunt?

As the sun disappears, our captain takes an unwise shortcut back to the island. The tide has been rising but we still hit a coral shelf. Above, the Milky Way is brighter. Suspended under this indigo sea of stars, I calmly scan for constellations invisible in the Northern Hemisphere (oh, look, there’s the Southern Cross) while everyone else on board radios for help or attempts to push us off the razor-sharp coral with bare feet, an effort more likely to attract hungry sharks than to get us back in time for our own dinner. By now, I should have mentioned that Fijians have a banana-peel sense of humor. When a rescue dinghy approaches in the pitch black, we can hear staffers giggling at the panicked 18-year-old driving the boat.

Back at the lodge, Mitimiti walks in her bare feet across a ceremonial reed mat laid on the floor. “I feel like a queen,” she says, grinning, head high. A granddaughter of the King of Tonga, she is also related to Cakobau, the high chief who ceded authority to Britain in 1874. (Fiji remains a member of the Commonwealth; Queen Elizabeth II has a cameo on the currency.) To my untrained eye, the straw she treads on resembles a Pier 1 bargain, but Jenny explains that handwoven mats are more prized than Justin Hunter’s pearls. Normally reserved for weddings and funerals, few people use ceremonial kuta as throw rugs. It’s a novelty to even step on one.

Grand Teton National Park Refines Bear-Watching Guidelines

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With grizzly bears and people coming closer and closer to one another in the front country of Grand Teton National Park, officials have refined their guidelines as to how close people can be to wildlife.

 

The need for the revisions arose as more and more visitors took to the roofs of their vehicles to photograph bears and, in at least two instances, the bears took exception and charged the vehicles, according to park officials.

While park guidelines long have said visitors should not approach within 100 yards of bears and wolves, or within 25 yards from other animals, including nesting birds, the updated regulation now specifies that “remaining, viewing, or engaging in any activity within 100 yards of bears or wolves” is against park regulations.

With highly photogenic grizzly sows No. 399 and No. 610 — and, this year, their five cubs — regularly frequenting the park’s front country, more and more photographers realized that they could get some great shots of them if they just waited long enough, Grand Teton spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs said Thursday.

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Grizzly sow No. 610 recently encountered lines of cars and photographers in the park. NPS photo.

“They sit and park for 12 hours a day where they think they’re going to get shots of these bears,” she said. “Other people who drive by think, ‘Oh, that’s a great thing to do.’”

The result is not just road shoulders lined with cars and trucks, but with people sitting atop those cars and trucks hoping for a great photograph to return home with, said Ms. Skaggs. When the bears arrive to this mass of humanity, problems can quickly arise, she said.

With recent instances of cubs running between parked vehicles, “it’s only going to be a matter of time we fear before one of those cubs gets hit,” the spokeswoman said, or “the mother is going to turn on somebody because of the congested condition and she’s going to be startled or agitated by how close somebody is.”

The change has not been well-received by all. In Jackson, Wyoming, wildlife photographer Tom Mangelsentold the Jackson Hole News and Guide that park officials were being unreasonable.

“I seriously doubt if previous superintendents would have gone so far as to say people in their vehicles can’t stop within 100 yards of bears or wolves,” Mr. Tom Mangelsen said. “I think this is laughable and incredibly retaliatory.”

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Grizzly cubs have had to dodge lines of cars in Grand Teton this summer. NPS photo.

Back at the park, Ms. Skaggs said there was nothing “retaliatory” about the revision, but that it was necessary due to the changing patterns in wildlife movements. When the previous regulation, which prohibited approaching within 100 yards of bears and wolves, was written, it was aimed at the backcountry traveler, she said.

“Conditions have changed greatly,” Ms. Skaggs said. “Having that wording in the compendium seems logical when you think that whichever superintendent ever wrote that provision, on foot or on stock, was how people would have encountered grizzly bears. But things have changed.”

Park officials say the “tremendous interest” in viewing the sows and their cubs, as well as other wildlife in the park, has created “large wildlife jams and caused situations where the well being of both visitors and animals may be in jeopardy. Wildlife viewing opportunities — and wildlife jams in particular — can be very fluid situations due to the unpredictable behavior and movement of animals, the ebb and flow of traffic, and other factors.”

In a press release she wrote, Ms. Skaggs said that “after a bear charged two different vehicles on two separate occasions while people stood on their car roof, park managers recognized the need to more strictly enforce the established regulations for wildlife viewing to better secure the protection of animals and ensure visitor safety.”

On Thursday the park spokeswoman said officials do want visitors to enjoy seeing wildlife, because by seeing animals in their natural environments they gain a better appreciation of wildlife and a better understanding of the value of national parks and the role they play in preserving wildlife.

“We definitely don’t want to take that opportunity away,” she said, “we just want to manage it so we protect the bears.”

The revision to the regulations could perhaps play a key role in protecting visitors who drive the Moose-Wilson Road in late summer and early fall to see wildlife. Black bears long have been drawn to the area because of the berry harvest.

“Our greatest fear is when a girzzly bear ends up in that mix,” Ms. Skaggs said. “When a grizzly bear figures out that’s a good location, then it kind of adds an extra layer of concern and sensitity to it. We may end up having to have rangers out there and have people drive slowly by there and not stop.”

In the end, she said, “We’re offering people this lifetime opportunity to see wildlife in its natural world, and yet keep people safe. It’s been a challenge. It’s been something that we’re not taking lightly.”

Top 10 issues faced by national parks

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  1. Untold Stories

    The term “national park” conjures up thoughts of big, natural landscapes likeGrand Canyon and Yosemite. But two-thirds of the National Park Service’s 392 areas were created to protect historic or cultural resources, from colonial Boston to New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. And many of those parks lack the money and staff to use those resources to their fullest.

    “We have an incredible collection of museum artifacts, and 45 percent of the Park Service collections have not even been catalogued,” says James Nations of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). “We’ve got stuff, and we don’t even know what we’ve got, and we don’t have places to store it. We’re missing opportunities to tell the story of America through our national parks.”

  2. Crumbling History

    National parks protect the historic buildings in which America’s history was made, places like Independence Hall, Ellis Island, and the San Antonio Missions. But some of these hallowed edifices are crumbling and in desperate need of repair. They’re a big part of a $9.5 billion maintenance backlog that plagues the park system.

    “We need to preserve and maintain those buildings because the stories are written in the stone and the bricks,” NPCA’s Nations says.

  3. Wildlife Management

    No park exists in isolation, and that fact is becoming increasingly clear as the areas surrounding parks are developed for living space, agriculture, mining, forestry, and more. The iconic species protected inside the parks don’t recognize boundaries and must often move in and out of the parks to feed, mate, or migrate. If larger ecological wildlife corridors can’t be maintained to include the lands outside of parks, many species may not survive within them either.

  4. Foreign Invaders

    National parks are inviting places, especially for non-native species that can cause havoc once they move in. Plants and insects often hitchhike to our shores on boats or airplanes while other species, like snakes, are intentionally imported for the exotic pet trade. When turned loose with no competition, invasive species can run amok in an ecosystem and send a park’s native residents toward extinction.

    More than 6,500 non-native invasive species have been found in U.S. national parks. Seventy percent of them are plants, which encroach on a staggering seven million acres (2.8 million hectares) of our national parklands.

  5. Adjacent Development

    A Canadian company hopes to site North America’s largest open-pit gold and copper mine right next to Alaska’s remote Lake Clark National Park. Uranium prospecting is currently under way on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Sugar producers have long fouled waters with phosphorus pollution and disrupted critical flows to the Everglades.

    What happens on a park’s borders can dramatically impact the environment inside the park itself. Mining, petroleum prospecting, clear-cut lumbering, and other developments are generally prohibited inside parks—but they still pose serious threats to water quality, clean air, and other vital aspects of the park environment.

  6. Climate Change

    If Earth’s climate continues to change as scientists predict it will, the national parks will be impacted like the rest of the planet. Glaciers may melt away, as indeed they are at Glacier National Park in Montana. Fire seasons may grow in length and severity, and the landscape may shift under the feet of the parks’ wild residents.

    “Changes in temperature and precipitation can push species out of their previous ranges towards softer temperatures, either upwards in elevation or northward,” says Nations. “But they don’t recognize where the boundary is and in many cases that land is owned by someone else.”

  7. Water Issues

    Some parks are already feeling drier these days, as increasing human demand shrinks supplies on which aquatic species depend. In Florida’s Biscayne National Park, where freshwater arrives from the highly compromised Everglades ecosystem upstream, a freshwater shortage is becoming an issue even though 95 percent of the park remains covered with seawater.

    Ten parks are touched by the Colorado River and its tributaries, which are being drained of water by the growing cities and farmlands of an increasingly thirsty West. Less reliable precipitation on a warmer, drier Earth would make this growing problem worse.

  8. Air Pollution

    Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Southeast wasn’t named for its smog, but it is one of many parks seriously affected by the problem. Air quality issues originate outside the parks. At Great Smoky, power plant and industrial emissions are blown by winds to the southern Appalachians and trapped there by the mountains.

    Air quality problems choke off views, poison plants, and even foul water. Recent air quality data show a glimmer of hope—visibility and ozone concentrations are stable or improving in most parks. However, in too many cases, stable means simply preserving a subpar status quo.

  9. Transportation Troubles

    National parks are the destination of many a great American road trip. But too many roads within the parks themselves are in disrepair and some pose a real danger to drivers. The same goes for many parts of the parks’ transportation infrastructure, from shuttle buses to hiking trails.

    Repairs are always under way but it will take time and money to truly set things right. More than half of the Park Service’s $9.5 billion maintenance backlog is earmarked for the transportation infrastructure that enables people to actually visit the parks.

  10. Visitor Experience

    Popular parks like Yosemite face overcrowding issues that would have amazed John Muir. Managers must balance open access with negative impacts on visitor experience and on park environments.

    Today’s visitors also use parks in new ways. Snowmobilers prowl Yellowstoneand pilots fly visitors over the Grand Canyon. Mountain bikers, motorboaters and many others all hope to enjoy their favorite pastimes in their favorite parks.

    Does allowing such activities enhance the park experience or detract from it? Managing preferences and park usage conflicts is a growing challenge for administrators—but NPS Chief of Public Affairs David Barna says the top priority is clear.

    “When we have to make a choice between recreation and preservation, we will always choose preservation,” he says, “and our decision will be based on our mandate, policies, and good science.”