Family Vacations

RECENTLY MY family and I spent a week in the Berkshires in Massachusetts doing what so many families do now on summer vacation: biking, canoeing and fighting off West Nile virus. Oh, yes, they're pretty freaked out about killer mosquitoes up there. It seems that a few days before we arrived, a couple of dead crows were scraped off a road and found to be infected with the virus. From then on, the entire region was one step away from breaking out the bio-hazard suits. Look, if you woke up one morning and the streets were littered with dead crows, sure, I'd say we had a problem on our hands.

Baltimore police are requesting about $2,000 to send an officer to California to provide security for Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on her family vacation next week. Officer Kyle E. Gooden, who is on the mayor's executive protection team, is requesting the Board of Estimates reimburse him about $1,900 for his expenses on the Aug. 20-26 trip to San Diego, Calif. The department is also asking for about $150 to cover the cost of a rental vehicle. The spending panel is expected to approve the expense Wednesday.

All-inclusive resorts make family vacations easy -- easy to budget and easy to handle. Besides knowing exactly how much your vacation will cost, an all-inclusive price means you won't have to play the heavy.Instead of saying no to your child who wants to windsurf, play tennis and try sailing because the hourly fees are breaking the family budget, you can put your hands in your pockets and smile as you encourage your children to go ahead and try another round. As a result, all-inclusive resorts are a special blessing for sports-minded families, especially those with active teens.

For the fourth year in a row, Maryland students have topped the nation in the proportion of high school graduates who successfully passed the rigorous Advanced Placement exams, leaping even further ahead of other top states. Twenty-nine percent of last year's class passed at least one AP test, compared to the national average of 18 percent. Maryland's pass rate is double what it was a decade ago. The results suggest that the state's commitment to investing in education over recent years is paying off in bumper crops of students with the kind of advanced, high-level academic skills the state will need to compete successfully in a 21 s t -century knowledge-based global economy, and that's all to the good.

IN THE DAYS before a vacation, I usually get the jitters. This year I went all the way and broke out in hives. I'm told this could be caused by some fruit I ate, but I think it was nerves. Had I packed enough washcloths?The June vacation is the really big one, the one with the baggage that isn't all beach chairs and towels. This installment is number 46 -- the 46th time my father has taken a house and had his children and grandchildren leave Baltimore for a summertime stay on the Delaware shore.

Trish Derwart doesn't take anything for granted.Not a year, not a month, not a day, not an hour, not a second."At the end of the day I don't want to have any what ifs," said Derwart, a senior Mount Hebron lacrosse player. "What if I could have done this better. What if i could have played harder. What if I had said this or said that. I want to do everything to my fullest and have no regrets. I do that with my sports, I do that with my life."Most 17-year-olds don't think this way. Then again, most teen-agers haven't seen first-hand how life can be so unfair.

Some Harford County parents think a proposed five-day limit on excused absences for family vacations, which has been proposed by a county school committee, is too strict.Patricia Jones plans to take her children, two first-graders, a fifth-grader and an eighth-grader, out of school for six days in November so that the family can accompany her husband, an insurance broker, on a business trip to Europe.Under the proposed five-day limit, her children's sixth day out of school would not be excused.

Talk to kids about family vacations and one thing is clear: They don't see the experience from the same perspective as a parent does.Museums that might broaden their horizons are dismissed as boring. Visits to relatives are excursions to be missed. Heart-stopping scenery rates barely a glance. Whatever the budget, it's not enough for the souvenirs they want. Hikes are invariably too long, while pool time is too short. Restaurants never have exactly what they're in the mood to eat. Neither do moms who have packed a picnic.

Kevin Leonard loves thinking about family vacations -- getting out the maps ahead of time, planning sightseeing adventures for the kids. He just hates going."

Go to the travel section of the nearest bookstore and see if you can find the family travel books. I can't -- not even the ones I've written.That's not to say the stores don't carry my books and plenty of others for parents and grandparents taking the kids on vacation. They do, and there are more titles out there than ever before. But good luck finding them. Bookstores don't typically feature sections for family travel.You might want to try another route. California-based Carousel Press has just published a new catalog of more than 100 family travel books.

TripAdvisor this week announced the winners of its first Travelers Choice Family award-winning best destinations. The travel guide has divded the winners into two groups: Top 10 Great Places to Discover and Top 10 Amusement Parks and Boardwalks. Ocean City comes in at No. 8 on the list of best family amusements and boardwalks. Anaheim, Calif., home of super-amusement park Disneyland, came in on top. Other Mid-Atlantic favorites to make the list include Wildwood in New Jersey and Hershey Park in Pennsylvania.

Here is an idea for the dog days of August: Let's not fight over vacation. Of course, every family has the right to squabble among itself on this topic. Some will lobby for the beach. Others will argue for the mountains. A few, usually those paying the bill, will advocate staying close to home. This is a matter that should be resolved " en famille . " We feel that way about the first family's vacations as well. We propose that when it comes to taking potshots at the president over where he and his family take their time off, Americans take a "time out. " What purpose was served by all those snarky remarks about the long vacations President George W. Bush and his family took at their ranch in Crawford, Texas?

My sister Mimi called me this week to ask if I was counting the days until we slip out of town for a vacation. She read my mind. I still happily indulge in a family vacation. The condo I rent is separated by one wall from the unit she shares with our youngest sister, Josie. It's a cozy arrangement but nothing like family vacations of 50 years ago. We rented a cute little brown shingle house in Dewey Beach, Del., built atop the sand dunes. It was roughing it, with only bottled water and the nearest phone blocks away in a general store.

W hat woman hasn't caught a glimpse of her aging face in the mirror and thought, "Oh, no. I look like my mother." What mother hasn't heard herself barking at her children and thought, "Heavens. I sound just like my mother." Me? Well, my hands look just like my mother's did at this age, and I find myself using her funny, old expressions: "It's as cold as Christian charity." And "There will be worse and more of it." But it is my mother-in-law that I seem to be channeling these days.

By now, you are probably savoring memories of a traditional Thanksgiving holiday spent dancing to disco hits, swimming in the frosty Atlantic and hang gliding off huge sand dunes. Huh? Well, my parents have spelled "vacations" a-d-v-e-n-t-u-r-e for as long as I can remember, so this range of strange is normal to me. A brief review of my vacation memories reveals my earliest one: my dad pulling off the road somewhere in upstate New York when he saw a hand-lettered sign that read "Piper Cub Ride's $40."

It's not my fault. I know you've been hearing a lot of that lately. From the presidents of banks and the CEOs of investment houses, for starters. But when the financial cognoscenti aren't blaming them for this economic mess, they are blaming people like me, and I am starting to feel defensive. I don't begin to understand what has happened to capitalism, but it looks like it is pretty much finished as an economic model, and everybody says it is the fault of people like me. They say people like me have been bingeing on credit for years, and now everybody is paying the price for my greedy impatience to live the good life, even though I couldn't afford it. I don't feel like I am living the good life.

It's not my fault. I know you've been hearing a lot of that lately. From the presidents of banks and the CEOs of investment houses, for starters. But when the financial cognoscenti aren't blaming them for this economic mess, they are blaming people like me, and I am starting to feel defensive. I don't begin to understand what has happened to capitalism, but it looks like it is pretty much finished as an economic model, and everybody says it is the fault of people like me. They say people like me have been bingeing on credit for years, and now everybody is paying the price for my greedy impatience to live the good life, even though I couldn't afford it. I don't feel like I am living the good life.

Paul Rosenfield hiked up an Alaskan glacier, kayaked in the rain alongside whales and sea lions and saw bald eagles and bears in the wild . . . all before he was 3.Now 4, he'll be making his second trip to the Alaskan wilderness later this summer with his parents and 8-year-old brother."

If your idea of a big vacation is a week in Ocean City putting a golf ball into the stegosaurus' mouth and sipping cocktails on the deck, you do not want to go away anytime soon with Richard and Kendra Keiser and their kids. Here are just a few of the relaxing things the Keisers did on their last vacation: Family feature The Keiser family of Harford County will be featured on Animal Planet's Get Out There! tonight at 8.

SUGAR LAND, Texas -- There's nothing about Republican Rep. Tom DeLay personally that math teacher Denice Shelburne doesn't like. The Texas lawmaker attends her church, where he mingles with the congregation as an amiable neighbor. His wife, Christine, is lovely, Shelburne said - and everywhere in DeLay's 22nd District is evidence of his good works. "I just think he's a wonderful person," she said. But as DeLay's legal problems have multiplied in recent months, even his supporters are having second thoughts about returning the 11-term congressman to office.