Give your kids a love of adventure and travel

If you have a love of travel and want to pass along a sense of wonder and curiosity to your children or grandchildren, I have a book to recommend. Atlas Obscura:Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid would be the perfect holiday gift for any child or grandchild ages 9-12.

With plenty of pictures and easy-to-understand descriptions of 100 extraordinary places to visit throughout the world, Atlas Obscura (Workman Publishing) becomes a passport to some of the world’s weirdest, exciting, most mysterious, and often obscure wonders. Destinations in 47 countries represent every continent in this incredible journey. GPS coordinates and useful travel advice are also sprinkled throughout the pages, so parents and grandparents may also find themselves dreaming about these fascinating places. 

What will young readers learn about? Caves filled with giant crystals seven times taller than a person in Mexico. The hottest town on Earth in Ethiopia and the world’s coldest town in Russia. The massive migration of blue whales through the North Atlantic in Iceland. A hot spring filled bacteria that create rainbow colors in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The planet’s largest ice cave in Austria. A theme park in Malta built on a movie set created for a live-action Popeye film 40 years ago.

Other fun facts that whet one’s appetite for more: Sticky rice was added to the mortar in the Great Wall of China to help glue it together. Don’t pat somebody on the head in Cambodia as the human head is considered sacred.  Until about 8,000 years ago sea levels were lower, and you could walk (rather than swim!) from England to France.

Many kids—and parents, too— will take away a sense of wanderlust, a desire to know more about this wacky and wonderful world in which we live. Information about cultures and history is presented in a fun way and illustrated by beautiful full-color illustrations. Wouldn’t it be great for your favorite young person to start a bucket list of places they’d hope to visit in future years?

Authors Dylan Thuras and Rosemary Mossco, with illustrator Joy Ang, have created a lovely coffee-table book that the whole family can enjoy. The book is available from the website www.atlasobscura.com or at other book sellers including Amazon or Barnes and Noble