Travel&Vacation

Growing up near New York City, school field trips to the Bronx Zoo were a regular thing; I don't think a year went by in elementary school when we didn't go to the zoo.  Additionally, with grandparents who were members, there were a lot of non-school trips there as well. The Bronx Zoo is a place I remember fondly, and consequently, on a recent trip back to the area, I went with my wife (who also grew up going there on a regular basis) and my two-year-old daughter, who had never been.  The day started out well enough, with my daughter going through the Children's Zoo, examining all the various birds and ducks and wallabies.  Though she was a little young to read about all the animals, she had no trouble trying to perform the same six-foot standing jump a
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New York City Parks Department tours kick ass. A few weeks ago we had a special bus tour of Fresh Kills, the huge Staten Island landfill, now closed, capped, and being planted in preparation for eventual conversion to parkland, but not generally open to the public at this point. This weekend, another Urban Park Ranger took us through the old fort at Fort Totten, a Civil War-era granite fortress on the Willets Point peninsula on the north coast of Queens. A short distance across the water from Fort Totten, on a spit of land jutting south from the Bronx and now in the shadow of the Throgs Neck Bridge, is Fort Schuyler, which dates from the 1830s and is now the SUNY Maritime College. The two forts were built to defend against a British naval attack on New York City from the east via Long
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In Germany, the word “schloss” means castle or “manor house.” These are historic structures, many first built during the Roman times near the very best vineyards in the land. The idea was to create a grand estate to showcase the quality of the vineyards and the wine. With wineries in San Ynez, California considered old at twenty, a 650-year-old winery seems very ancient indeed. Yet this is the age of Schloss Schonborn in Germany’s Rheingau region, which goes back to 1349. Owned by Paul Graf von Schonborn-Wiesentheid, it is the largest family owned estate in the Rheingau comprising some 125 acres (50 hectares) of top vineyard sites. The winery has recently been modernized with stainless steel tanks. Many of the wines produced here make their way to Asia and
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In Latin America and Europe combined, approximately 250,000 bulls die each year. Do these bulls fall prey to a deadly virus, perhaps? Far from it. The bulls are tortured and killed for the sake of entertainment. Have we evolved at all since the Roman times? Latest polls show that over 72% of Spanish citizens have no interest in bullfighting, yet, because of a small group of influential people in Spain, this inhumane tradition is being kept alive. Fortunately, in Europe and Latin America a growing segment of the population is standing up against bullfighting and calling for an end to this cruel spectacle. Here to talk about bullfighting and what we can do to help is Alyx Dow, Programmes Officer (Anti-Bullfighting) for the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). Thank you for
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Are We There Yet?: World Adventure is a live-action preschool travel adventure series that takes viewers on 39 brand new, globe-trotting adventures across ten countries and 27 cities. For the second season, two new sets of child hosts welcome children to explore the world with them. Instead of the first season's brother/sister sibling pairs, this time brothers TJ (8) and Tristan (6), and sisters Joanna (7) and Julia (6), capture their experiences in places like China, Russia, New Zealand, Italy, Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, and Egypt, as well as the US and Canada. "The magic of the show is because younger kids haven't fully adopted their own culture, they're sponges to everyone else's," said producer J.J. Johnson during an interview on the TV, eh? show on
Tags: passing the reins, season, sibling pairs