Food Lovers' Europe: A Celebration of Local Specialties, Recipes & Traditions by Cara Frost-Sharratt

The Food Lovers’ Guide to Europe is the definitive guide to the Old World’s tastiest destinations. Blending practical travel information with hand-picked selections of the finest culinary treats Europe has to offer, London-based food and travel writer Cara Frost-Sharratt outlines the cuisines of more than forty destinations within twenty-five European countries—from classic ones such as Paris, Rome, London, and Brussels to newer places on the culinary map, including Vilnius, Tallinn, and Bratislava—before focusing in on their most exciting gourmet hotspots. A must-have handbook to Europe’s gastronomic delights, it includes recipes throughout.

Food Lovers' Guide to Montreal: Best Local Specialties, Markets, Recipes, Restaurants & Events by Patricia Harris

The ultimate guide to Montreal's food scene provides the inside scoop on the best places to find, enjoy, and celebrate local culinary offerings. Written for residents and visitors alike to find producers and purveyors of tasty local specialties, as well as a rich array of other, indispensable food-related information including: food festivals and culinary events; specialty food shops; farmers’ markets and farm stands; trendy restaurants and time-tested iconic landmarks; and recipes using local ingredients and traditions.

Food Lovers' Guide to Seattle: Best Local Specialties, Markets, Recipes, Restaurants & Events by Karen Brown

The ultimate guide to Seattle's food scene provides the inside scoop on the best places to find, enjoy, and celebrate local culinary offerings. Written for residents and visitors alike to find producers and purveyors of tasty local specialties, as well as a rich array of other, indispensable food-related information including: food festivals and culinary events; specialty food shops; farmers’ markets and farm stands; trendy restaurants and time-tested iconic landmarks; and recipes using local ingredients and traditions.

West Coast Road Eats: The Best Road Food from Los Angeles to the Canadian Border by Anna Roth

As "locavore" becomes part of our everyday vocabulary and food critics continue to give West Coast cuisine accolades for its freshness and sustainability, West Coast Road Eats shows how why we eat-and where we eat it-matters more than ever. Part guidebook, part travelogue, and part history lesson, West Coast Road Food is a love letter to the seafood shacks, farm stands, taquerias, ice cream parlors, burger joints, wineries, and more that make up our unique edible ecosystem. Covering more than 1,500 miles from the Canadian border to San Diego, West Coast Road Eats offers a plethora of unique restaurants that dot the freeways and scenic byways of the West Coast. With suggested itineraries, overviews of major cities, and sidebars covering everything from captivating food-factory tours to instructions on how to pick the best produce at a farm stand, this book focuses the relationship between food and a sense of place with the enduring image of the American West as a backdrop.

To find more great eats from around the world, search our catalogue with the words "restaurants guidebooks".

So-o-o, you have the kids home for the next two weeks and are looking for some activities that will keep them away from the TV and computer. There is so much to see and do, your problem will be making a choice.

Calgary Public Library has free programs during the break. The library is offering everything from holiday music and storytimes to video games and giant chess. Check out our Programs page to see what is offered near you! And don't forget to stock up on all the wonderful books and movies available through the library.

Heritage Park has closed their main gates for the winter but just outside the gates you will find the Haskayne Mercantile Store, Railway Cafe and Gasoline Alley Museum open year round. If you have a car crazy kid, you will want to visit Gasoline Alley. It is a hands-on, interactive museum with vintage automobiles and a storytime every Tuesday morning at 10:30. They are celebrating the holiday with Winter CARnival from December 27 - January 8.

For the military buffs in the family, visit the Military Museums of Calgary. And for your child who is fascinated by airplanes, there is the Aerospace Museum and Spaceport.

The Calgary Zoo is offering their fantastic Zoo Lights display until January 7th, excluding Christmas Day. There is a storytime on Thursday, January 5th from 11:00 - 11:30. And, of course, you can come to see the animals every day from 9:00 - 5:00, except for Christmas Day.

Fort Calgary, with its lively interpretive centre is open over the holiday season from 9:00 - 5:00, except for January 1, December 24, 25, 26, 31 and January 1.

Telus Spark, the new Science Centre, offers many interactive activities, including the Creative Kids Museum. Be sure to check the special holiday hours.

And don't forget the Olympic Hall of Fame and Museum at Canada Olympic park and the Glenbow Museum with its marvellous exhibits of Canadian Western heritage.

The City of Calgary offers a listing of outdoor cross-country skiing, skating rinks and tobogganing hills, which may or may not have snow if this lovely warm weather continues. Perhaps it will be hiking rather than skiing.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum is always a great day trip. Find out more by checking our recent blog, Walking with the Dinosaurs. Don't forget to check for the holiday hours.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump also makes for a great day trip.

You can always look to the mountains if there is no snow in Calgary. Find out all the great activities through the Banff-Lake Louise site.

You can find coupons for some of the above attractions at www.calgaryattractions.com. (Most of them expire by the end of 2011)

Happy Holidays!!

Our family is reading the Scott Westerfeld Steampunk trilogy: Leviathan, Behemoth and Goliath. It’s a great bedtime story for an older boy. An alternate history of World War I, there are daring adventures and dramatic cliffhangers which careen past like old movie serials. Simon likes looking at the black and white illustrations of steam powered tanks and battle armor. The main characters are Alek, an Austrian prince, and Deryn, a girl disguised as a midshipman in the British Navy. They travel across the world in an airship.

Steampunk is a literary and artistic movement that reimagines the Victorian world as if steam power were the main form of energy instead of electricity. Several children’s writers have played with the genre, including Arthur Slade with his Hunchback Assignments, meant for readers in grade 6 and up. Another Steampunk novel is Airborn by Kenneth Oppel, the author of the Silverwing bat novels. I read this when it came out and can’t wait to share it. This exciting adventure has orphaned Matt and wealthy Kate searching for strange flying creatures as they travel on an airship.

Simon and I travelled to Seattle for a Steampunk convention. First stop was The Museum of Flight, filled with World War I aircraft. Simon loved being the expert explaining to me how they all worked. This fantastic museum contains a comprehensive collection of historical aircraft, including a Sopwith Camel, a Spitfire, a Harrier Jump Jet and a Concorde. We toured the retired Air Force One plane for President Kennedy, which had a little dog door inside for presidential pups.

Like the Arts and Crafts Movement, Steampunk is partly a reaction to mass production, and homemade items are much respected. Some ladies spend months researching and sewing elaborate Victorian gowns. The men make shiny futuristic weapons. Oftentimes they start with Nerf guns as the base. The guns are “modded” with the addition of hardware parts, and are painted metallic colours. A significant part of the Steam convention is the costume show and tell, where you ooooh and aaaaah over what others have made.

We visited Seattle landmarks that would appeal to a 10 year old boy. We first saw the Frank Gehry Experience Music Project building from the Seattle Space Needle beside it. This undulating building contains exhibits about popular music and science fiction. We enjoyed the innovative technology In the Avatar movie exhibit. Next we went to the Pikes Place Market to check out the wall of gum. It smelled beautiful! After buying some Chukar Cherries, we headed to the Fremont neighbourhood. It’s a great place to walk around with lots of public art, including the Fremont troll sculpture tucked under a bridge. There are lots of places to eat, including an organic chocolate factory which offers tours and samples. Check out Walking Seattle by Clark Humphrey for some ideas.

Just north of Fremont is Archie Macphees. This is the place Simon talked about most when we returned home. It’s a joke shop full of more stupid gags than you imagine existed. Simon was especially impressed with the bacon items: bacon Band-Aids, bacon flavoured tooth floss, rubber bacon action figures, and bacon breath mints. On our last morning we went to a breakfast buffet and he ate a plate full of bacon. As we drove to the airport, he was already asking to come back to Seattle.

Kari

Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology

First, a trivia question: Which town in Southern Alberta has about 8,000 inhabitants and more than half a million tourists every year? The town in question is, of course, Drumheller; the reason for such high tourist activity - dinosaurs.

Situated 183 kilometers northeast of Calgary, Drumheller is set in a spectacular lunar landscape, in a valley carved through the badlands by ancient glacial meltwaters and constant prairie wind. The area surrounding the town is known as one of the richest paleonthology sites in the world. Scientists from all around the globe come to Drumheller valley to study the prehistoric animals that reigned the Earth tens of millions of years ago.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum, the crowning jewel of Drumheller, is the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to the science of paleontology, and the home of one of the largest and finest collections of dinosaur remains. Even those not-so-paleontology-crazy visitors stand in awe in front of 50 full-size dinosaur skeletons and thousands and thousands of specimens that bring the prehistoric past to life. The Museum also offers a variety of creative, fun and educational public and school programs and science camps.

The Museum currently offers about a dozen permanent exhibits and three special exhibitions. “I Think…” (Charles Darwin, 1837) is dedicated to Darwin’s theory of evolution and its impact on modern society. Triassic Giant features the world’s largest marine reptile that measures 21 meters in length and dates back to the Triassic, 220 million years ago. Alberta Unearthed features “25 of the Museum’s most significant specimens and recounts rarely told stories of discovery. This special exhibit is about the people, places, and pieces that comprise Canada's dinosaur museum…”

From Alberta Unearthed exibition: In southern Alberta, some ammonites have a unique form of preservation. Tectonic pressure, heat, and mineralization over millions of years, compress them into colorful, iridescent material used to create jewellery. Ammonites preserved in this manner are both fossils and gemstones, and although fossils are protected under provincial legislature, permission is granted by the Alberta Government to mine the gemstone.

You are planning the trip of your dreams to someplace warm and wonderful and you want to make the most of your travel dollar. Earlier, I talked about the many guidebooks we have at Calgary Public Library that can help you plan your trip. Today, I'll talk about some of the on-line sites you can use to look for the cheaper fares and accommodation.

When you are the one planning and booking your trip, it is important that you check different sources to verify your information and to compare prices. As well, it is of vital importance that you check and double-check your reservations. You don't want to be the one who ends up in Sydney, Nova Scotia instead of Sydney, Australia or arrives at the airport to discover that your plane left the day before. Mine is the voice of bitter experience - I arrived a week late for my plane. The airline had made a mistake on my reservation and I didn't notice!! Big, big oops!!

The following are some of the sites you might check for prices on flights, hotels, packages and cruises. Some sites offer all of these, some only do flights and accommodations. Some of them allow you to book directly and some will direct you to another site. I would suggest taking a look at the different sites and seeing which ones work best for you. I would also suggest that you check more than one site for prices as the lowest fares vary from site to site and day-to-day. Also, be careful to check what is included in the price.

Hipmunk offers flight information all on one page in a graphic format which I found very easy to use. On this page flights are listed in order based on a combination of price, flight duration and number of stopovers. Information on hotels is based on a combination of price, amenities and reviews.

Expedia, which has been around forever as travel websites go, does flights, packages, hotels, cruises, car, rail, tours. It also features last minute travel deals and mobile apps.

Some other websites worth looking at are Travelocity, Orbitz, and DoHop.

TripAdvisor contains reviews on accommodations and tourist destinations made by other travellers. I played with this site using Calgary as my sample just to see how accurate the reviews were and how much they agreed with what I thought. Some were good, some not! It's always best to check more than one source.

Facebook is a great way to check with people you know. Request opionions on your travel destination, places to stay and things to see from your circle of friends.

To make the most of your travel dollars, it is also important that you travel safely. Our Best Websites include the government sites which share information on the safety of travel destinations and health issues for travellers. Click on Best Websites and enter the tag "travel".

The best way to travel is to know before you go!