Discover Portland’s best family-friendly outings, activities, attractions, and day trips in this complete, portable guide to family fun. The Family Adventures guides are must-haves for local parents and visitors, as well as babysitters and other family members who want to explore Portland, Seattle, and the surrounding areas with kids. These go-to guides offer comprehensive ideas and listings appropriate for a wide array of ages, from babies and toddlers to young teens. Activities range from exploring children’s museums and other hands-on creative destinations to hiking, swimming, and ziplining, as well as visiting libraries, zoos, playgrounds, and much more, including where to find the best ice cream! Bursting with relevant, reliable information and tips, as well as itineraries for one day or more, these guides will take the place of hours of tedious online research. Instead you’ll find everything you need to know in one book that you can also pop into a bag or stroller and bring along with you. Whether you unexpectedly have a couple of free hours or want to plan a weekend away, grab a Family Adventures guide and make some amazing memories with your kids!

Get the inside scoop on the best family-friendly outings, activities, attractions, and day trips in the greater Seattle area in one comprehensive, portable guide. The Family Adventures guides are must-haves for local parents and visitors, as well as babysitters and other family members who want to explore Portland, Seattle, and the surrounding areas with kids. These go-to guides offer comprehensive ideas and listings appropriate for a wide array of ages, from babies and toddlers to young teens. Activities range from exploring children’s museums and other hands-on creative destinations to hiking, swimming, and ziplining, as well as visiting libraries, zoos, playgrounds, and much more, including where to find the best ice cream! Bursting with relevant, reliable information and tips, as well as itineraries for one day or more, these guides will take the place of hours of tedious online research. Instead you’ll find everything you need to know in one book that you can also pop into a bag or stroller and bring along with you. Whether you unexpectedly have a couple of free hours or want to plan a weekend away, grab a Family Adventures guide and make some amazing memories with your kids!

Pack your bags, hop a plane, and take a trip! Embarking on a journey with your kids can be a thrilling and rewarding adventure. Family travel is also a great way to expand your cultural horizons and help cultivate our next generation of global citizens. This book offers hundreds of easy-to-use ideas for:* Drumming up excitement for the journey ahead* Teaching your kids to pack themselves* Having fun at the airport and on the plane* Easing jetlag and schedule changes* Involving everyone in setting itineraries and expectations * Making museums and tourist stops engaging for everyone* Enriching your travel experience through journaling* Keeping the joy of the journey alive long after your return* Discovering cultural education in your own back yardThis book is intended for well-seasoned travelers and newbies alike who enjoy being with their children, want to enrich their education, and are excited to discover, as a family, the vast and unique experiences this world has to offer.

Explore Seattle like a local! This deck features 50 walking tours packed with insider tips. Walks include: • The Space Needle • Pioneer Square • Pike Place Market • Discovery Park

Trails specifically selected with younger hikers in mind Tips for family vacation destinations Features easy-to-access “nature fixes” throughout Western Washington Author Susan Elderkin has seen her kids express wonder and glee at discovering insects and flowers, melt down in tearful defiance in the middle of a trail, and triumphantly reach a summit and view. In short, she’s a regular mom who wants to encourage other parents to get their regular kids out into nature too. While Susan is an expert hiker in her own right, it’s her children who helped her to see hiking from a kid’s point of view. The result is Best Hikes with Kids: Western Washington, a fresh and wholly new guide for families looking for quality time together away from their distracting devices. Guidebook features include: 125 hikes—carefully selected and vetted by both parents and children Routes range in length from less than 2 miles (great for toddlers) to as much as 6 miles (for older kids who want to test themselves) Handy info blocks give a quick snapshot of each hike: best season, difficulty, length, high point, and elevation gain 13 “Great Getaways”—weekend or vacation destinations around the state with hiking trails and other family-fun activities Colorful icons indicate star attractions of the hike: splash zone, wildflowers, old-growth, dog-friendliness, stroller-accessibility, and more “Best of” lists make it easy for families to match hikes to their kids’ interests Driving directions, complete trail information, GPS trailhead coordinates, and color map included for each hike Tips on how to motivate kids on the trail, what’s appropriate for different ages, nature facts, and more Whether you’re looking for the best hikes to hug a really big tree; take a fun and refreshing dip; see birds, animals, or waterfalls; go on a winter day; or stuff yourself with berries, Best Hikes with Kids: Western Washington has you covered.

Award-winning storyteller Donna L. Washington has cooked up a delightfully spooky tale in this imaginative twist on the classic "Goldilocks." Curly Locks is a good-hearted girl, but she's an awful cook. All the townspeople of Toadsuck Swamp know to steer clear of her peculiar dishes—like batwing brownies and toad eye toffees. So it's quite a mystery when one of her dishes goes missing from her windowsill. Next morning, chaos breaks out in town and word spreads how the Scares of Toadsuck Swamp are running wild and terrorizing the town at mealtime. They shriek "Gitchey Boo, Gitchey Bon! Gitchey Goo, Gitchey Gone!" and send folk running for their lives! But Curly Locks isn't frightened, and she has an inkling her unsavory cooking can help corral those Scares for good. Exercising tremendous narrative skill, internationally known storyteller Donna L. Washington breathes a spirited new life into an old classic. Her clever, can-do protagonist and joyful language pair brilliantly with Jeffrey Ebbeler's fantasy-like illustrations. This enchanting read is a treat for any time of the year!

Following The Highest Tide, Border Songs, and Truth Like the Sun, Jim Lynch now gives us a grand and idiosyncratic family saga that will stand alongside Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Joshua Johannssen has spent all of his life surrounded by sailboats. His grandfather designed them, his father built and raced them, his Einstein-obsessed mother knows why and how they work (or not). For Josh and his two siblings, their backyard was the Puget Sound and sailing their DNA. But both his sister and brother fled many years ago: Ruby to Africa and elsewhere to do good works on land, and Bernard to god-knows-where at sea, a fugitive and pirate. Suddenly thirty-one, Josh—who repairs boats of all kinds in a Steinbeckian marina south of Seattle—is pained and confused by whatever the hell went wrong with his volatile family. His parents are barely speaking, his mystified grandfather is drinking harder, and he himself—despite an endless and comic flurry of online dates—hasn’t even come close to finding a girlfriend. But when the Johannssens unexpectedly reunite for the most important race in these waters—all of them together on a classic vessel they made decades ago—they will be carried to destinies both individual and collective, and to a heart-shattering revelation. Past and present merge seamlessly and collide surprisingly as Jim Lynch reveals a family unlike any other, with the grace and humor and magic of a master storyteller.

These are real-life tales of moms and dads braving the unavoidable struggles of travel--flight delays, lost luggage, middle-of-nowhere engine breakdowns, and middle-of-everyone emotional meltdowns--to share new experiences with their kids. As all of these parents will tell you, traveling with kids is never easy. But the benefits can be invaluable.What could be more important than introducing our children to cultures where families, not so unlike our own, look and live and speak and eat differently than we do. What could be more useful than giving them the tools to deal with the challenges encountered on the road.Taking risks, overcoming challenges, discovering beauty, and opening our minds and hearts. These are the things we hope for each time we pack our bags, load the car, or board a plane. This is why we leave home and head into the unknown. No matter how old we are, each of us wants to be filled with awe and to feel fully alive. And we want to share these experiences with the people we love the most, so that these moments of wonder might live on for years to come.- Travel tips for the age groups 0-3, 4-6, 7-10, 10-13 as well as thirteen and up are laid out in detailed chapters. Also for older children from the ages of eleven to thirteen for example, travel provides an opportunity to deepen a connection, or to reconnect, with a child that might be spending more and more time away from you.- Reif Larsen, author of the novels The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet and I Am Radar, speaks in his essay about rediscovering nature with his children around their home during the current travel restrictions.Family Adventures provides inspiration and guidance for vacations long and short; creating memories that last a lifetime.

Called "invaluable and highly recommended" by Library Journal, these best-selling relocation guidebooks in the USA feature in-depth neighborhood and community profiles, as well as chapters on getting settled, helpful services, childcare and education, transportation and more.

A fun, educational guide and activity book, Adventures in Greater Puget Sound, explores the magic of the marine life in the region. Learn fascinating and concise information about wrinkled whelks, whales, eagles and more. Both children and adults will want to try their hand at the variety of activities ranging from hidden pictures, crossword puzzles and decoding the captain's secret message. Adventures in Greater Puget Sound has become a classic in homes and classrooms everywhere. Revised and updated in 2011.