IF you'd like your children to enjoy travel as much as you do, get them involved in vacation planning early. That way, the trips your family takes will become their project too. Children's travel books can make the job simpler.
Some of the books are written for kids to help them gear up for trips they'll actually take. Others are narratives that will send them vicariously to places they're unlikely to see in person. The goal is to encourage a sense of wanderlust and a desire to learn how other people live.
Here's a look at some recent offerings:
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"Travels With My Family"
By Marie-Louise Gay
and David Homel
Groundwood Books: 119 pages;
a few black-and-white drawings;
for ages 7-10; $15.95.
Maybe you had parents like this: "Disneyland was too normal for my parents. Too much like everybody else, too ordinary." In "Travels With My Family," a wise-beyond-his-years kid laments the travel choices of his parents, whose desire to get off the beaten track is so intense it leads the family into sandstorms, Mexican political unrest, hurricanes and alligator-infested swamps.
The story, written by a Canadian husband-and-wife team, isn't clearly labeled fiction or fact (the family's given names are never revealed), but it has the ring of truth for anyone who was ever forced to spend long hours in the back seat of a car.
But there's more to it than that: The family challenges Mom's fear of heights on a New Mexico canyon trail, fights tides at a Georgia beach and gets nibbled by peacocks at a British Columbia farm. The narrator's little brother spends an evening dressed in a tablecloth as his wave-soaked clothing tumbles dry at the laundromat. Nothing too ordinary about that.
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"This Is Venice"
By Miroslav Sasek
Universe Publishing: 64 pages; color illustrations; for ages 9-12; $17.95. Other books in the series cover Paris, New York, San Francisco, London and Ireland.
Is it fair to give a child a 45-year-old book? Many Dr. Seuss books are even older -- but a guidebook? Miroslav Sasek, a Czech writer and illustrator who died in 1980, was inspired in the late 1950s to create travel guides for children. In 1961, he produced "This Is Venice," but its 2005 republication isn't a problem, because the Italian city he pictured hasn't changed much. Pigeons still congregate in St. Mark's Square. Boats still take the place of trucks and buses, and "as much as Venice loves the water, the water loves Venice -- and periodically proves it."
