Travel with Grandkids

  This past week the little, my husband, and I traveled to Arizona. That’s correct. We traveled to a desert during the hottest month of the year. And we loved it! Our final destination was the Grand Canyon, which I’ll cover in a future post, but we decided to spend a few days in Phoenix beforehand. The Grand Canyon was a cool and collected 75° while 7,500 lower in elevation, Phoenix was a bit warmer at 105°. We knew we couldn’t spend a lot of time outside, so we searched for indoor activities to entertain our three-year-old traveling companion. The  Musical Instrument Museum  was just what we needed. The museum is home to an extensive collection of…you guessed it…musical instruments from around the world and across the ages. The Little wasn’t terribly interested in cases full of historic artifacts she couldn’t touch, so we headed straight to the museum’s Experience Gallery. In this gallery, everything is touchable, playable, pick-upable. The Little played a taiko drum from Japa

 Last week we packed up and headed to the Great Smoky Mountains and Gatlinburg with the family: grandparents, parents, kid. Keeping everyone entertained and happy wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected. Gatlinburg (and its neighboring city, Pigeon Forge) sits in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, America’s most visited National Park. The mountains themselves are a playground for all ages. There are trails and waterfalls and historic sites to keep any visitor busy for weeks. We had three days, so we were only able to visit a few of the highlights. One of our group is in a wheelchair, and we were surprised to find how accessible everything was. We discovered wheelchair-friendly picnic areas, pathways, even a paved, flat half-mile “hike” he could go on. The Sugarlands Valley Nature Trail ran along a rushing creek (where the kids scampered to splash and skip rocks) and the remnants of old homes (“Nana, why is there a chimney in the woods?”). We spent most of our time staying and play