My pen-pal Kelly and her husband Justin visited from Australia in the spring, and as their hostess, I thought it would be nice to put together an itinerary, highlighting the best of the Bay Area (it was the least I could do, since she and her family have done the same for me!). Since their guide book covered San Francisco pretty well, I decided to put together a must-see list outside of the City:

On the day they arrived, in order to try to keep them awake, I suggested something low key and close to home, Stanford University. In addition to being one of the best universities on the West Coast, it also offers much to the local community. We started by visiting Hoover Tower and taking a ride to the top, for a panoramic view of the surrounding area. I am not a big fan of heights, so I stuck to the center area, but Kelly and Justin were excited to take pictures of the scene below. Then we walked over to the Cantor Museum, where we explored the outdoor Rodin Sculpture garden, before going inside to view the exhibits. My favorite is always the giant banana in the courtyard, and the permanent installation upstairs.

Our next adventure involved visiting a few of the 100+ Santa Cruz Mountain Wineries. Napa’s quieter, South Bay cousin, is home to some of my favorite wineries, just a 30 minute drive from our house. For Kelly and Justin, I suggested a visit to Ridge Vineyards, followed by a stop at Byington for a picnic lunch, and then finishing at Bonny Doon. Since we had time, we also visited the new Presentation Center, down the road from Byington, for a view of their new “Green” Welcoming Center.

Since I am such a foodie, I suggested our next day trip venture to the East Bay. We started in Oakland on College Avenue, with a stop at La Farine for some morning buns (who cared that it was already 11am!). For lunch, we stopped in at Oliveto at the Rockridge Market Hall, and spent time after lunch exploring the specialty food purveyors downstairs of the restaurant. Our next stop was Berkeley, for a quick tour of Scharffenberger Chocolate. I had made reservations ahead of time for the tour, and it was well worth it. Before heading home, we stocked up!

No trip to Northern California is complete without a visit to the Monterey Peninsula (IMHO), so for our final excursion we drove down to Point Lobos State Park, where, after entering the Reserve, we headed for the Sea Lion Point Trail, one of my favorite walks out to the ocean. On the way back, we stopped in Carmel for lunch at Casanova, and then headed up the coast to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. After a couple hours in the Aquarium, exploring the Kelp Forest, and my favorite, the Jellyfish exhibit, we headed home. By this time, I think I had exhausted my guests and they were ready for a vacation from their vacation!

Tell me, where do you like to take your visitors?

From guest blogger, Andrea Widburg, of Andi’s Answers

Have you ever been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York? It is, in my opinion, the best museum New York has to offer. All the other New York museums — the Met, Frick, Museum of Natural History, MOMA, etc. — are sort of generic. By that, I mean that, while they’re great museums, you can find their like in every major world city. The Tenement Museum, however, is something entirely different, since it’s a time capsule of a unique moment in American immigrant history.

The museum occupies an old tenement in the Lower East Side that was built in 1867 and that was continuously inhabited through the early 1930s. It was then sealed up, where it remained as an unlikely time capsule to be explored decades later.

New York’s Lower East Side, of course, is the first neighborhood through which the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe streamed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. During the museum’s heyday, when it was a functioning tenement building, the Lower East Side was more densely packed than Calcutta.

The museum is a staggering testament to the human ability to adapt and survive. Each apartment in the building is roughly the shape and size of a full size school bus (although slightly shorter and wider). The apartments were divided into three parts: a front room, a kitchen, and a back bedroom. As originally built, only the front rooms had windows. In the 1890s, however, the building was remodeled to add a cut-out between the kitchen and the front room, to allow some natural light into the kitchen. The back bedroom had no natural light at all.

What’s almost inconceivable is that these teeny, dark apartments usually housed an average family of six or eight people. Indeed, if the family was really strapped, the six or eight family members would live and sleep in the two front rooms, with a paying lodger getting the privacy of the back bedroom. During the day, while the kids were at school (or, often, working) the same apartments would be used as sweat shops where up to twelve people would cram into the two front rooms to make clothes.

There were four units to a floor. When the building was first build, there was no plumbing, although a single toilet was eventually added on each floor. In other words, during a busy work day, one could have a potential daily toilet load of forty-eight people per floor.

When we visited the museum, it was your average hot New York summer day, with the temperature around 92 degrees and the humidity correspondingly high. The building’s interior was sweltering, and the kids, comfortably attired in shorts and t-shirts, instantly set up a round of complaining about how hot they were. They fell silent, though, when they learned that the building’s original tenants would have been wearing the neck to ankle clothes of times’ past, and that they would not even have had the benefit of the rickety fan the museum had installed to provide some cross-ventilation for weary visitors.

I’ve been to so many museums in America and Europe, including a broad variety of wonderful, non-traditional museums. None has ever struck me the way this one did. Although the rooms are oppressive and depressing, they are also a stirring testament to the hearty spirit of those who came to this country. These immigrants managed, not only to live under such conditions, but to do well enough economically that their children did not have to repeat the experience. I know this because census data shows that, almost without exception, the children who grew up in these slums managed to move to the suburbs and to take their parents with them. Whether these immigrants were Russian, Polish or Italian, Jewish, Protestant or Catholic, they catapulted themselves out of these appalling circumstances and went on to live the American dream. It was, therefore, a very inspiring day’s visit for our whole family.

Where would you go if you could go anywhere, do anything, this holiday season? That’s the question that fellow Kblogger Pat asked me last week. Sure, I have a list of places I want to check out in the next decade (Dubai, Petra, Santorini, the Seychelles, Buenos Aires…), but what would make for an awesome end-of-the-year getaway?

The days are getting shorter and the weather’s getting colder here in Palo Alto. This imaginary journey begins with a trip south, to a land where a quick 16-hour flight turns winter into summer. Yes…..I speak of Sydney, Australia.

Sydney, an eight time recipient of Travel + Leisure’s “World’s Best City“, is home to friendly locals, a diverse social life, and distinctive structures (Opera House, Harbour Bridge). Sydney is a great city for travel, as 31% of the inhabitants are travelers themselves (born overseas) with the main streams of immigration coming from England, China, and New Zealand. After a bit of research and some friendly recommendations, I’ve compiled a list of the top five activities and “must sees” for the youthful (or young at heart) traveler.

1. After the transpacific flight and a bit of jet lag, I’d jump right back on a plane and go skydiving over Sydney Harbor. I’ve yet to jump out of a plane at 14,000 feet, but from what I’ve heard there’s no better place to do it than Sydney. Clean air, endless ocean views, a beautiful cityscape below, and the far reaching outback in the distance. This would surely start the trip out on the right step…..err jump.

2. Minus 5 “the coolest experience” is a bar made entirely out of ice, cooled to a teeth chattering -5° Celsius. All patrons must dawn fur overcoats, thick gloves, and boots before entering the bar. After you finish your cocktail, you can shatter your ice glass on the icy floor. There’s a 30-minute limit in the igloo bar to avoid onsetting hypothermia. Very cool!

3. Next I’d like to spend a half day on the water, sailing around beautiful Sydney Harbour. With the world famous Sydney Opera House to my left and the massive Harbour Bridge to my right, I’d be surrounded by architectural beauty.

4. Being an avid sports fan I would love to catch an Australia v New Zealand rugby match. Rugby is a fast paced, hard hitting, continuous demonstration of speed and strength combined with athletic creativity. The Wallabies (Australia) and All Blacks (New Zealand) are two of the best national teams in the world and share one of the fiercest rivalries in sports. I’ll just need to remember to wear a Wallabies jersey.

5. Finally, a trip to Australia wouldn’t be complete without a Kangaroo sighting (the fact I’m a Kango likely influences this impulse), so I’d make my way over to the Taronga Zoo to catch a glimpse of the marsupial in its native land (well not the zoo).

Wow,Next locale on this phantom vacation of mine…Bali, Indonesia.

Sydney –> Bali –> Hong Kong

An exotic city – island paradise – exotic city sandwich if you will.

Related: Meat and Wine Co. Restaurant in Melbourne, Australia.

From guest blogger, Andrea Widburg, of Andi’s Answers

Paris in the spring is the stuff of poetry, Paris in the summer is the most popular tourist time, and Paris in the winter is a great time to go, especially when you’re traveling with two active elementary school aged children. We went to Paris last winter right after Christmas and, while the crowds were still overwhelming, it felt almost empty compared to the usual summer traffic. Here are some of the things we discovered:

The Louvre Museum is a great way to stay out of the rain. Our kids are very active, and they need room to roam. The Louvre museum, at almost 200,000 square feet, is so huge that they got more than enough activity. The collection is also awe inspiring.

Though the children would really rather have their nails pulled out than spend time in the average museum, even they were thrilled to get an up-close view of the Mona Lisa. They were also completely charmed by Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s imaginative paintings, which use fruits, vegetables, flowers and plants to create portraits. As for me, as a Medieval Flemish painting junkie, the Louvre was art heaven.

Another exciting place to visit was the Conciergerie, the former palace and prison in which Marie Antoinette spent her final days before meeting Madame la Guillotine. It’s a grim place, and the small, but excellent exhibit (which includes a guillotine blade that was still used in the 19^th Century) gives you a hint of the horrors it held for its unfortunate residents. The children, needless to say, were thrilled.

Right around the corner from the Conciergerie is one of the most uplifting places in all of Paris: the Sainte-Chapelle, a small Church from the mid-13^th Century that has the finest stained glass windows in Europe. Even on an overcast winter’s day, the interior is radiant. Between the windows and the painted surfaces, one has almost no sense of the stone bones underlying the chapel’s construction. Although the children were pushed to their limits for the half hour we spent inside, I don’t think they regretted it, because even they recognized its extraordinary beauty.

Lastly, if you have active children and find yourself in Paris in mid-Winter, go to Versailles. We started with a tour of the Palace’s interior, which stunned the children with its gaudy magnificence. By tour’s end, however, they simply collapsed and couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Fortunately, “getting out” took us onto Versailles’ grounds, and we spent several hours wandering around there. We visited Marie Antoinette’s exquisite Petite Trianon, made especially poignant by the fact that we’d earlier soon the grim cell in which she lived during her last days. There was also room just to run. Because of the cold, most people weren’t lingering in the garden, so my kids could really stretch their wings, with pauses to look at the swans, sheep and ponies that still live in Marie Antoinette’s silly little model farm. Because of the combination of eye candy and space that Versailles offered on a winter’s day, I have to say it was probably the best day we spent in Paris.