A Coast Ride in Costa Rica, photo from Equitrekking

I had heard about inn-to-inn riding trips years ago, and was surprised to find that there is a wonderful ongoing PBS travel show dedicated to this very thing. I realize that this may be out of the comfort-zone for some of you, but keep in mind that equestrian travel can actually be quite family-friendly. Preteens often pick up riding skills quickly (more quickly than adults ), and this can be a wonderful, memorable trip to take with your family if you have teens.

Tent Camp in India, photo from Princess Trails

There are equitrekking vacations in just about every country on the planet – from England, Ireland and Spain, to India, Nepal and Chile – to name a few. You can make trekking the main event, or just try it for a few days in the middle of a longer trip.

Self-Guided Ride in France, photo from Equitours

By horseback, you can cover more ground than by foot – and have more fun, if I do say so myself! For the more adventurous and experienced riders, you have the option of taking a self-guided trek: You are given a horse, a picnic lunch, maps and a compass, and find your own way to the next inn or castle where a hot dinner will be waiting for you.

View from the Trail, Wyoming, photo from Equitrekking

The resources I found to be most helpful if you ever decide to plan an equestrian trip are the Travel Search from the PBS show website, and Equitours, which is a company that has been organizing riding trips for the past 30 years in many countries around the world. Happy trails!

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Little Sheep Sticker Pack from Cutiepie Company

What to send? Read the FAQs to get the full scoop on guidelines, but I thought I would add a few of my own ideas as well:

• Although they do not want glitter because it’s messy, I think any kid would love to receive some cool stickers.
• Be funny: Send photos of your pets and/or your children dressed up in silly outfits, include a few jokes or riddles, or tell a funny true story.
• Do consider the child’s age when putting together your package – the current featured kids range in age from 2 to 14…that’s a big difference!!

Go to Make A Child Smile to get started! Special thanks to Melissa for spreading the word on this organization; check out Operation Nice for more NICE stuff

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As I was catching up with the James family on their round-the-world travel blog The Wide Wide World, one recent event stood out above all others: Caroline James, who is 13 years old, wrote an outstanding article describing her experiences volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai provence, Northern Thailand. The Nature Park is home to more than 30 elephants rescued from horrific situations. They are given a new life on the beautiful grounds of the Nature Park, lovingly cared for by founder Lek Chailert (pictured above).

Caroline and Conor bathing an elephant

During her day volunteering, Caroline fed the elephants, bathed them in a river, scrubbed their backs, and helped clean the camp. It sounds like a truly amazing experience – read Caroline’s article here. And to give some props to Dani and Craig, how awesome is it that they took their kids volunteering instead of the typical Americans-Abroad type activities? To me, that gets to the heart of the difference between vacationing and traveling. Traveling is about more than rest and relaxation; it pushes you to try new experiences. It opens your eyes.

How You Can Help The Elephants in Chiang Mai:

- Buy an elephant medical kit ($20) or an elephant lunch ($10) from The Elephant Nature Park Store to help care for the animals.

- Sign up to be an Elephant Volunteer for a day, a weekend, a week, or a full month.

- Help the herd at the Elephant Nature Park by Fostering an Elephant – this would be an excellent gift for a child who loves elephants. You get a photo of the elephant you have chosen to sponser, along with a bio and updates throughout the year. What a wonderful way to teach a child about empathy!

Photo credits: top photo © Elephant Nature Foundation; bottom photo courtesy the wide wide world

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{Possibilities} by Lucky Jackson

I love living vicariously through the experiences of round-the-world travelers (especially families taking on the adventure with kids in tow like The Wide Wide World) and hopefully, one day I will do it, too. Which is why I was so enthralled by this story on maya*made – In 1934, Maya’s Grandmother Bev (who turned 88 two weeks ago – Happy Birthday, Bev!!) set out on a Round the World trip traveling by steamship. Today, we may take for granted the fact that we can hop online and see pictures of the most remote corners of the globe, chat with someone thousands of miles away, and even have a video call with a friend on the other side of the world. Many of us have friends, relatives, or colleagues who live in another part of the world. If taking a round-the-world trip is still a life-changing adventure today, imagine what it would have been like for Bev, at 13 years old, to embark on a steamship journey to places she may never have seen photographs of. Now that’s an adventure!

Bev kept a magnificent travel log and journal with detailed drawings of the steamers she traveled on (above), lists of places visited (they were many!), along with her thoughts and observations. Do you or your children keep a journal when you travel? There is something so personal and lasting about a journal filled with handwriting and sketches that even the highest quality digital photos and most up-to-date blog entries can’t compare to. Looking at these pages, lovingly saved for the past 75 years, reminds me of the importance of recording our own family histories…and it’s fueling a serious case of wanderlust!

To read about Bev’s amazing story and peek inside a trunk filled with treasures from her journey read Maya’s beautiful post, Celebrating My Hero.

A big thank you to Maya for sharing the photos of Bev’s journal!

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Since we last caught up with the James family on their round-the-world trip, they have been very busy! From Australia, Dani, Craig, and their two children traveled to Thailand where they have been learning about the history of Buddhism, taking in the Grand Palace in Bangkok, enjoying an amazing variety of delicious street food, and dealing with a hilarious lost-in-translation moment involving a hotel housekeeper and a packet of mystery medicine that you *must* read. Just outside Chiang Mai, the whole family went to the Thai Farm Cooking School – let’s take a little peek…

The day begins with a tour of the local market (pictured above) and then a walk around the grounds of the school, which is also home to an organic farm.

After choosing a menu, each person gets their own cooking station in a big, airy room – here’s Conor working on his curry dish. And then the best part: sitting down to the feast at a gorgeous outdoor table overlooking the gardens.

I just love the idea of seeking out a cooking school when you are traveling – it seems like a fantastic way to get acquainted with a new culture. Children are almost always welcome, it’s a creative, satisfying experience for the whole family and you come away with new skills and a full belly Read more about the James family cooking school experience on their blog. And if this making you hungry, you can find the recipes for classic Thai dishes like Red Curry with Chicken, Pad Thai, Bananas in Coconut Milk, Springrolls, and more on the cooking school’s website, right here.

Dani and Craig are in the middle of a round-the-world trip with their two children, Caroline and Conor – if you are new to their adventures, you might want to check out their guides to the places they have visited so far: Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and Australia, and be sure to visit their blog, The Wide Wide World.

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Ahri Golden and Tania Ketenjian,, co-founders of Thin Air Media, produced BIRTH, an audio documentary aired in 2007 to wide acclaim, which explored the ways practices and perceptions of birth have changed in America in the past 100 years. Now these two spirited ladies have taken on the postpartum experience with their new project, BORN, which hits the public radio airwaves for Women’s History Month in March, 2009.

Golden and Ketenjian dive into this subject from many angles by including the voices of women speaking honestly about their postpartum experience and how their identities have changed after becoming mothers, fathers sharing their own experiences, as well as tapping a diverse group of experts – from neurologists, psychologists, therapists, obstetricians and pediatricians, to midwives, evolutionary biologists and sociologists all weighing in on the subject.

BORN is nationally distributed by Public Radio International (PRI) and is available to public radio stations during and after March, 2009, though it will not necessarily be aired in all areas. Ahri and Tania add,

With questions of early motherhood and work at the center of today’s
public debate, we invite you to email and call your station to request
BORN be aired in your community. Please find your local station at
www.pri.org and click on “Stations”.

I am really looking forward to hearing this – I am hopping over right now to request that the Providence public radio station airs BORN, and I encourage you to do the same for your area!

If you want to know more about Ahri and Tania, check out their interview in 7×7 Magazine, and listen to their first project, BIRTH, for free right here.

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“Portrait of a Sandwich” by Jennifer Squires

According to a University of Arizona study, the average family in the United States tosses out close to $600 worth of food each year, while annual household food waste in this country totals a whopping $43 billion. Seattle-based blogger Crunchy Chicken has issued a challenge: Let’s try to reduce our food waste this month. Reducing the amount of food waste your family produces saves you money and reduces pressure on overcrowded landfills. Why not give it a try? If you are interested in taking on this challenge, simply comment on this post over at Crunchy Chicken.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

♡ Plan meals before shopping

♡ Take a look in your cupboards before shopping, and plan meals around what’s left

♡ Freeze fruit that’s about to turn, and use it to make smoothies later

♡ Be realistic about how much your family will eat in a week, and don’t over-shop

♡ Add a piece of fresh fruit to dinner leftovers and bring it for lunch the next day (and do the same for your kids!)

♡ Use stale bread to make croutons, panzanella, or bread pudding

♡ Go to Cooking By Numbers to find recipes using whatever is left in your kitchen

♡ Read more about this issue on the Wasted Food blog

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The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is now the greenest museum on the planet. It is also the largest public building to have attained the platinum rating for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) , and it’s really cool. For the past several years, the Academy was moved to a temporary location in downtown San Francisco as the new building was constructed. The new Academy building, located on the same site in Golden Gate Park as the old museum, was designed by Pritzker Prize winning Italian architect Renzo Piano, and incorporates an amazing array of green features. The 2.5 acre living roof is planted with 1.7 million native plants, recycled denim was used as insulation, gigantic solar panels cover the roof, the building is heated with radiant heat, and rechargeable vehicle stations and bike racks wait outside for eco-friendly forms of transport. The building itself now acts as an exhibit, offering a wealth of information about sustainability and energy conservation.

Native Californian Plants Cover The Living Roof

A View of the 4-Story Rain Forest

Within those new eco-friendly walls lies a real treasure: A four-story rain forest enclosed in a giant glass dome. You can walk through the rain forest, following a meandering path as it climbs from one layer to the next – and with the temperature maintained at a range of 82-85 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity kept above 75%, you can actually feel the damp heat on your skin as birds and butterflies soar overhead. Then a glass elevator takes you beneath the rain forest, into the flooded Amazon basin, where you walk through a clear underwater tunnel to view the tropical freshwater fish.

The New Digital Planetarium, And An Old Favorite, The T-Rex

Add to that a 3D theater, natural history museum, new digital planetarium, naturalist center, garden, aviary, roof terrace, lecture hall, two restaurants, and one of the largest exhibits of living coral reefs in the world, and I do believe you can find something for every member of your family to enjoy. And if you go on the third Wednesday of every month, it’s free!

Living Coral Reef Exhibit

Panther Chameleon

To find out more about the California Academy of Sciences, check out their beautifully redesigned website. They have also developed a number of interesting blogs that take you behind the scenes at the Academy and on research expeditions, as well as sharing their entertaining 24/7 Penguin Cam – just click here to reach all of these features.

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I chanced upon this quote while reading The Gentle Art of Domesticity by Jane Brocket which, coincidentally, is something I count as one of those small pleasures in my life. Daniel Gilbert, known at Harvard as Professor Happiness, summed up his research in a popular book, Stumbling on Happiness. His findings indicate that it is actually the routine, everyday sort of things that really make us happy. We may think that if we could just win the lottery or publish that novel or fill-in-the-blank, then we could be really happy. But research shows that we often wrongly predict how happy or unhappy some event in the future will make us. We catastrophize things that end up being not so bad, and we tend to overlook the little things that can actually make a huge impact on our well-being. Jane Brocket adds that,

It helps to have a state of mind that can turn even the smallest indulgence into a luxury. This means looking positively at your life — considering not what you want to have, but what you can, or already, have. It means deciding for yourself what you class as luxury and not following the  media’s overblown ideas… Pretty buttons, trimmings, ribbons, lovely yarn, half a yard of a beautiful fabric, a good novel or a book of poetry, a few squares of chocolate, a box of French macaroons — all are strung on my personal necklace of luxuries.

“Girl in the Café” by Maile Lani

I love the image of a “necklace of luxuries” – all of the little things you love in life, strung together in a long, happy chain. Some of my little luxuries include: an afternoon spent reading, a leisurely home-cooked breakfast, a bouquet of flowers, red nail polish, a walk through a nursery or garden in spring, good movies, and sitting down to write in a cozy café. What would make up your necklace of little luxuries?

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Jarid Manos may look like a tough guy, and he is. The story of his childhood and young adult years reads like a series of bad news headlines: Abuse. Neglect. Teenage runaway. Extreme poverty. Drug use and alcoholism. In an interview with Madeline Ostrander for Yes! Magazine, Jarid said, “I was so alienated that even joining a gang would have been way too adjusted for me.” But even during his darkest times, he adds that, “Nature was my refuge, and I understood on a gut level that it was under threat. I saw prairies, wooded streams, and waterfalls destroyed by bulldozers.” Jarid made a choice not to continue on a destructive path, but to pick himself up off the ground and get to work.

Youth InterACTION Group, Turner Falls, OK, photo © Great Plains Restoration Council

In 1999, Jarid founded the Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC) in Fort Worth, Texas, which, since that time has protected three major preserves on the prairies and plains of the United States – totaling over 18,000 acres. In addition, through a project called Plains Youth InterACTION, the GPRC organizes groups of kids from the inner cities and Indian reservations and involves them directly in restoring prairie and plains environments. As Manos describes on the GPRC website, through this project,

Inner city and rural reservation kids develop strong character, leadership, personal responsibility and ownership of the consequences of their actions, all anchored in a newly established sense of ecological identity.

Due to the success of this project, the GPRC is now working to develop an Ecological Health Curriculum that could be used in public schools throughout the Great Plains.

Through my teaching experiences in inner-city schools and many conversations with my husband, who worked for a time in a group home for boys, I have come to understand the great importance both of role models and a connection to nature in children’s lives. When children have role models that they can relate to, they can be inspired to work harder, to think better of themselves, and envision a more positive future. And if that role model leads them to nature, children begin to see outside of their city (or suburban) bubble and a whole set of benefits emerge: better health, a feeling of usefulness, freedom, and even the experience of a spiritual connection with our world. Jarid is, in a way, the most important kind of role model. He is proof to the kids in his GPRC program that success on your own terms is possible, no matter where you come from.

Refuge, Fort Worth Prairie Park, photo © Great Plains Restoration Council

Today, Jarid is a proud and caring father, activist, vegan mountain biker, and author – his book, Ghetto Plainsman, tells the gritty story of his path from troubled youth to environmentalist and teacher. To find out more about Jarid, or to get involved in Prairie restoration projects, visit his blog, The Ghetto Plainsman, or the website of the Great Plains Restoration Council.

This was the first in a new monthly series at Global Mama, where I will be sharing the stories of people who are making a positive impact on the world. These are not necessarily the sort of heroes who get a lot of news time; but in my mind that only makes them more important. If you have a suggestion for an everyday hero in your community that you would like to see featured here, please contact me using this form or email me directly at laura@globalmama.com

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