There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that we could not last until October before traveling again, so today we find ourselves getting to The Big Apple - New York City.

We’re planning on about two weeks of vacation, Traveling Richters style. That means lots of eating out and exploring.

On the exploration agenda, we’re taking the kids to their first trade show - the New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF) in order to give them an idea how gift shop retailers find things to sell, as well as how wholesalers and distributors market their wares. We have a business reason in going too as we run our own on-line gift shop at www.BonaireStuff.com - we’re hoping to find some more interesting Bonaire and Caribbean oriented merchandise to carry in our on-line store.

We also have walking tours scheduled through Context Travel (www.ContextTravel.com) to learn about the Cloisters, the history of tea, ethnic cooking in New York City, and making chocolate. There’s also an off-Broadway show (Around the World in Eighty Days) booked. We’re also hoping to catch the Buckminster Fuller exhibition at the Whitney Museum, plus more regular forays to places like the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim.

And then there’s the dining! We have dinner reservations for almost every night we’re in town at restaurants including Tabla, Le Bernardin, Per Se, L’Atelier des Joel Robuchon, Asiate, WD-50 (molecular gastronomy), a table in the cheese cave at Artisanal Bistro, and a few more goodies. We’re also trying to coordinate a cooking class at another top restaurant, and perhaps a demonstration of cooking with liquid nitrogen (see the post on The Fat Duck in England from a couple of months ago about what this is all about) one evening if we get the timing to work out.

I will try and post pictures and reviews here as best I can.

As is undoubtedly obvious, we travel a lot with our kids. While they are 11 and 13, we still worry about what would happen if we somehow got separated from them while out and about in a big city. To deal with that possibility, we try to make sure they always have a laminated card with contact information for us (cell phone numbers) as well as for their grandmother. And we make sure that they have cell phones - but those don’t always work in international locations.

Imagine our pleasant surprise when we checked into the Marriott Park Lane in London back in May, and the front desk staff made a point of handing each child a business card with the hotel’s contact information on it, telling them that if they get separated from us to just use the information on that card to get in touch with the hotel and they would help make sure the kids got back to the hotel safely.

Of the hundreds of hotels we’ve stayed at with the kids over the last decade or so, this is the first and only time the front desk (or anyone at a hotel) has ever suggested or offered this additional piece of mind.

So kudos to the Marriott Park Lane, and other properties, please take note of this simple but useful idea.

We discovered recently that two of The Traveling Richters, namely myself and Bas, had our picture in a recent issue of Florida Travel + Life magazine. It was in the May/June 2008 issue (cover pictured at right).

The occasion of our inclusion was an article on page 107 by publisher Carolyn Pascal about Kids Sea Camp, a program which we first participated in during its inception in Curacao some years back with our friend Margo (the owner of the Kids Sea Camp program). Most recently, we spent Thanksgiving week in 2007 with Margo at Kids Sea Camp in Fiji. Carolyn Pascal (another long time participant) was there and snapped a picture of Bas and myself coming out of the water after a nice shore dive - a dive on which Bas, aged 10 at the time, saw his first ever shark while diving.

Below is a photo of the article page - that’s Bas and me in the upper right corner.

Here she is! Cyndi Lauper!

While we wait, another picture - this one with Bas holding our backstage passes up for viewing.

The Traveling Richters are on the road again, albeit for just about a week. Today found us in Plano learning from friend at Texas Instruments how DLP technology works to put crisp images on our large screen TVs and now we’re at SuperPages.com Center for the True Colors Tour concert featuring Cyndi Lauper.

We’re presently waiting to participate in something called a Meet & Greet involving Cyndi, whose birthday it coincidentally happens to be today. We are prepared with Bonaire-related gifts for her.