Latitude: 39 degrees north. Population: 3 toddlers making like mad penguins.

It is 10:30 am at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences and we should probably have brought chairs to the ice slide at the back of the Ends of the Earth: from Penguins to Polar Bears experience.

Our kids are making a track in the carpet, circling back, head-firsting it down the gentle slope, jumping up, and circling back. This is going to take a while. They liked the crawl-in polar bear cave, and the light-up display that shows how deep an iceberg goes, but the penguin slide is where you should send our mail.

We'll come back another day (highly useful, those family memberships) to visit with the dinosaurs.  We had a great time watching the live boa constrictor in the reptile show. And when she's older, or calmer, she'll like the butterfly exhibit more.  Even now, it was pretty impressive - being eye to eye with a moth the size of her hand, and looking at the different stages cocoons the cocoons were in.  But there wasn't (thank all that is good in museum design) a slide.   So here we are, in the arctic.  For the duration.  Don't forget to write…


Editor's note: many, many thanks to Sheila Scarborough over at Family Travel for the wave in her Great Travel Links post!  She picked up Raq's Top 5 Places to Go in Greece and How (not) to get an Infant's US Passport in 27 Easy Steps.