NEW YORK-
A new book called “101 Places You Gotta See Before You’re 12” can help you plan all kinds of trips with your kids, everything from once-in-a-lifetime destinations to local forays that are easy to do in an hour or two.
A landfill, an artist’s studio, a working farm, an art site, a general store, a street market, an antiquarian bookstore, a second-hand store, an ethnic restaurant, a patisserie, a place to stargaze, a place of worship, and a parent’s office are all sites of potential interest to kids, and are doable trips for most families.
Other places mentioned in the book may require a bit more planning and driving, depending on where you live, such as a trip to a fort, a prison, a wildlife refuge, a famous road, a subway, a mint, a big cave, or a marvel of engineering.
Although the book lists all these places as generic categories, it also comes with specific recommendations or resources for finding many of them. For example, the book mentions eight ideas for seeing a migration path, including the sandhill cranes that visit the Platte River in Nebraska every February; the monarch butterflies in Pacific Grove, Calif., each October; and the sea lions that breed summers in the caves near Florence, Ore. To find a ghost town, the book recommends going to . The back of the book also lists many possibilities for various categories, such as these for “space places”: Washington’s Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas.
Kids can also indicate their level of interest in the ideas on each page by choosing from stickers that come with the book stating “top 20,” “yawn fest,” “loved it,” and “this rocks.”
“101 Places You Gotta See Before You’re 12,” published by Lark Books, a division of Sterling Publishing Co., is by Joanne O’Sullivan. The paperback sells for $9.95.
