If you’re looking for skiiing nearly 365 days a year, then Whistler-Blackcomb is the place to go. Located less than two hours from Vancouver, British Columbia, Whistler will be the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics. It has over eight thousand acres of territory, including over two hundred ski trails, and receives thirty feet of snow per year, on average. And, since the peak of Whistler Mountain has year-round snow, a trip in June doesn’t mean leaving the skis behind.

Winter fun abounds, with skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling, heli-skiing (helicopter ride to the top of the mountain), and the Coca Cola Tube park, where entire families can ride inner tubes down the slopes.

In the summer, the upper peaks remain snow covered, and the lower hills become the Whistler Blackcomb Mountain Bike Park. The Zipline Ecotour is a fun and exciting way to explore old-growth forest–by zooming across a cable a hundred feet off the ground. Other summer activities include a combination bungee/trampoline, ATV and jet boat rides, whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, and a climbing wall.

Whistler has one of the best children’s ski training programs in the world, pairing the children with the same instructor for the entire week. The ski areas include family friendly slopes with “Go Slow!” flags posted, a ski-through castle, and an Enchanted Forest.

Daycare is also available for younger children; the daycare attendants are licensed, and they keep a 1 to 4 ratio for infants and toddlers, and a 1 to 7 ratio for preschoolers. For both groups, the parents are given a pager in case of emergency. Whistler even has a Kid’s Night on Saturday evenings for children aged 5 to 12; after all, they deserve a break from their parents sometime, right?

Finally, Whistler is Dog Friendly! No need to leave Rex in the care of neighbors or strangers, because even the furry family members are welcome.

Universal Studios is a great place to take the kids. Not only do they have wild and interesting rides, but you can get a look “behind the scenes” at how movies and tv shows are made.

The park is actually split into two parts. The upper part is the theme park, with the majority of the rides, the characters, and the food. It’s separated from the lower part with one of the largest escalators in the world. The lower part is the actual film lot, and a tram ride shows visitors quite a lot of it.

First, the rides and attractions. Using the same sort of “flight simulator” design as Disney’s Star Tours, the Back to the Future ride lets visitors ride in a modified time machine into the past and future, and the tourists almost get eaten by a dinosaur along the way.

The ride that dominates the entire park, though, is the Jurassic Park ride. The plot is simple; the tourists are on a boat excursion through the park when the “incident” from the movie releases the animals. The boats are diverted into the waste processing facility, while being threatened by a variety of animated dinosaurs, and just as it seems they’re about to be eaten by the T-Rex, they dive beneath his feet and down a huge drop into water. The “you might get wet” warning is an understatement–the ride is designed to soak every rider to the skin.

Follow the soaking with the Backdraft attraction. After an intro area that shows how some of the fire effects are created, the crowd is ushered into a mock-up of a factory that explodes into flame right in front of them. There are literally explosions happening twenty feet in front of you, with no more protection than a handrail.

The tram ride is a mostly tame but very entertaining ride through movie history, complete with the Bates Motel from Psycho, the shark from Jaws, and a simulated earthquake in a train station.

All in all, Universal Studios Hollywood is a great place to take the kids for a weekend.

Club Mediterranee–”Club Med”–is a chain of resorts based in France, based on the concept that the staff should make friends and freely associate with the guests. Their Sandpiper location is two hours from either Orlando or Miami, and was designed to be the perfect “family friendly” Club Med location.

The rooms are perfect for a family. They are roomy and comfortable, with large closets and easy access to washer and dryer, and even a sitting area with sofa and chairs.

Sandpiper offers specific rooms and programs for each age group. Infants, one year olds, two year olds, three, etc; each one has a room dedicated and a program suited to them. There’s even a “Baby Bottle Room,” open 24 hours and stocked to handle any child’s snack requests.

For walkers up to two years old, there are activities like Bubbles Walk and Swing and Slide. Two and three year olds are helped with Plaster Hands, Magic Show, and Discovery Walk.

Four to seven year olds can enjoy hat making, trampoline, and the Sandpiper 500, while eight to ten year olds get to start on rollerblading, waterskiing, and tubing (waterskiing on an inner tube). And eleven to seventeen year olds can enjoy trapeze, golf, tennis, sailing and more; just check the activities list posted daily.

Every week, the kids join in for a MiniClub stage show, complete with costumes and lighting. And every evening, the kids hop into pedal cars for the nightly Sandpiper 500 race.

Oh, and there’s stuff for the adults, too. Tennis, trapeze, trampoline, waterskiing, Disco Yoga, sailing, and golf are all available. There’s also the Siesta Club, where Sandpiper staff will sit with kids from 8pm to 1am while the grownups get out of the hotel room.

All in all, there aren’t too many places more family-oriented than Club Med Sandpiper.

For sheer variety, there aren’t too many places that can beat Northern Arizona for landscape and beauty.

First off, select a home base–a place to return to after driving around all day. The Northern Arizona sights are relatively close, but “relatively” still might mean a few hours drive. One of the best home bases is Sedona. It’s got quite a collection of shops and restaurants, and also has Slide Rock, in Oak Creek Canyon, just a few minutes outside of Sedona.

Slide Rock is a canyon carved out of the red rock by Oak Creek. The algae covering the rocks makes them especially slippery, so swimmers can actually slide right on down the river, like a naturally formed water park. It’s a very popular destination, but be sure to check with the park in advance, because they will close the creek to swimming if the algae level gets too high or the water level gets too low. Oak Creek is also great for fishing.

With a comfortable home base, the family is ready to make their expeditions to the other Northern Arizona sites of interest, starting with the world’s biggest hole in the ground, the Grand Canyon. Carved out of bedrock by the Colorado River, the canyon is a scar across Northern Arizona, and offers some of the most incredible views in the state.

Between Sedona and the Canyon is Flagstaff, one of the few places in Arizona where you can go skiing. That’s always been an attraction for Phoenix dwellers–the possibility of driving to Flagstaff at dawn to ski all morning, then driving home to jump in the backyard pool.

There are several other sites of interest within a few hours’ drive from Sedona, such as Meteor Crater, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, and Montezuma’s Castle. All of them are worth the trip, and make Northern Arizona one of the most attractive areas in the country.

If you were traveling with children in Europe, wouldn’t it be nice to have a “home base” to start from? That place would need large, family friendly lodging, with plenty of activities for both kids and parents for those “stay in the hotel” days, and a staff fairly fluent in English. It would also have to be affordable, and located pretty near the spots you’re thinking about visiting.

Amazingly enough, such a place does exist. Center Parcs has a chain of twenty locations spread across Europe, with resorts in France, England, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. They haven’t done much advertising in the United States, so most American travelers don’t even know they exist.

The distinguishing feature of each of these resorts is the big dome that houses the kid’s activity area, restaurants, shops, spas, and pool–though “pool” hardly does it justice, since it has water slides, kiddie pools, wave pools, and more. The restaurants cover the full range from fast food to gourmet specialty, and there’s even a supermarket.

Each resort offers a variety of kid-friendly activities. They have activities like Baluba and Experience Factory, which are a roomful of play equipment and toys to climb on, plus petting zoo, pony rides, climbing walls, and even snorkeling.

For adults, each resort has shopping, saunas, bicycle and hiking trails, swimming and skiing, and more.

All of the resorts are located fairly near to landmarks and cities (like Waterloo, Antwerp, the Hague, and Paris), so they make a perfect “home base” from which to explore Europe.

What’s more, the cottages at each resort are roomy and comfortable, because they were designed to handle a three-generation family. Most have fireplaces, widescreen TV, children’s beds, and private balconies. As a special feature, families can even reserve a room with a puppet theater, circus tent, baby bath, and collection of toys.