Travel Reading to inspire trips or to help you when you get home on a Monday

In the next few weeks you’ll hear about our recent trips to San Diego, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo on the blog-we literally just flew in from our travels and back to a world of baseball and soccer practices, piano and school.  It makes me realize how precious family time on trips is in all the haze of everyday life and it makes me realize how valuable travel reading to inspire future trips is for our family.

Another precious commodity is sleep and I’m looking forward to delving into a book that was on my doorstep when I arrived home.  Arianna Huffington has written a book on sleep called the Sleep Revolution and sleep deprivation is such a horrible problem!  How many hours minutes a night are we supposed to be getting these days???!!  And how much sleep do we lose when we travel back and forth through time on long trips and have to deal with jet-lag?

I find reading at night helpful in helping to catch zzzz’s.  On the airplane I read the Vacationers and it was entertaining and I always like to read books about trips on trips so it was quite fitting and although I thought it might end up a little sad, I was quite content with how the story went.  Have you read the Vacationers?  What did you think?

I also watched it’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong on our flight away from Hong Kong and wished I’d seen it on the way there instead.  It highlights some neat spots in Hong Kong that I would have liked to see had I known they existed like the Duddel Street Steps and Gas Lamps which would have been pretty awesome to see .  Do you get travel ideas from movies?  I also really love seeing where people visit in their Instagram feed for travel ideas lately too!  I do still appreciate guidebooks though and we definitely brought our Lonely Planet Hong Kong book on our trip!  (We’ve been using these guidebooks since our pre-internet days-I can’t imagine NOT using a guidebook for a trip!)

And now we’re back I’m looking for where to go next.  Lonely Planet Kids sent me a bunch of books including some awesome pop-up books for places like London, Paris and New York and it’s made me think maybe this summer we could travel from Seattle to New York to London.  I think London is an awesome place for kids and it feels like forever since I’ve been but I’m still at the research stage and can be easily swayed.  Can you think of any fun places to go in the summer?

So in the next few days I’m going to be flipping from my sleep book to dreaming about travels and plotting where we go next while my kids try to round the bases at their next baseball game.  Are you travel dreaming today?  How do you get your inspiration?

(PS I received copies of Arianna Huffington’s book and the Lonely Planet kids books pictured above for review but I was not required to post and these thoughts are my own.)

(PPS. If you have travel inspiration and want to share I’d love to hear about it too!)

Terumi

Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys.  She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live.  She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)