By its very nature, family travel is more expensive than a single person or a couple hitting the road. This is especially true if you need to fly, which you pretty much always need to do if you’re leaving your own continent.

It doesn’t have to be as expensive as many parents believe, however. You don’t need a $25,000 tour and you also don’t need seven nights in an expensive resort. If you visit The World’s Cheapest Destinations and take your time, in the end you can spend far less than you would have driving to Disney World for a week.

Family travel requires more work, however, and you can do a lot better with proper planning than you would just winging it. So if you’re a new parent or one that would like to travel more, spending a little time and money on the right book can save you plenty of cash—and hassles.

I’ve been checking out a new book called Family on the Loose that does a good job of answering any questions you might have and answering a whole lot of others you should have had. It’s a thorough, well-organized book that leaves no travel stone unturned.

It’s by Bill Richards and E. Ashley Steele, two blogging parents with two daughters they’ve taken with them to 13 countries away from home. Obviously they hadn’t read The World’s Cheapest Destinations before embarking on these journeys since all of them were in Canada or Europe, so if there’s anything lacking in this book it’s advice on traveling in countries less developed than our own. With all the less savory aspects that go with it.

Most tactics for family travel are similar no matter where you’re going, however, so as a primer on how to do it right, Family on the Loose is a great resource. It is organized in three sections: Ready, Set… (planning); Go (flights and on the ground); and Traveling Home (preserving memories, international exploration at home). Packed in there are very useful chapters, text boxes, and checklists for what to remember or at least consider.

I especially like their advice on getting the kids involved at any age and there’s a cool packing checklist that uses pictures—so non-readers can still grab what they need from their dresser. There are table games to play at a restaurant while waiting for food to arrive, city scavenger hunt forms, museum activities, and other nice additions besides just advice on how to book a hotel and get around town.

Family on the Loose lists for $13.95 paperback and is under $10 for the Kindle. Get a copy here.

While I’m on the subject, Dale and Michelle Bartlett handed me a copy of Have Kids—Will Travel when I was speaking at the last TBEX bloggers convention. It took me a while to get to it and this family travel post was my incentive. 

As with the authors of the first book, this family also spent most of their travel time in Europe, so it’s focused on metros, trains, and budget airlines that are so prevalent there. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with a book like this though as even an experienced traveler like me will find tips and websites that were unknown before. I found myself dog-earning pages to go back to later when I was online.

This was a family of six people on the road, so if yours is too large to cram into a typical hotel room, this book will get you thinking about other options like home exchanges, park cabins, and using loyalty points for connecting rooms. With that many people to transport, this family has learned a thing or two about cheap flights and making the most of frequent flier miles as well.

You can see more at their site Havekids-Willtravel.com or get a copy of the book at Amazon.

If you do want to venture out with your family into the developing world, where things are cheaper but sometimes more difficult, my go-to recommendation has long been the Rough Guide book on Traveling with Babies and Young Children, but it seems to be out of print now. Next best is Lonely Planet’s version, but they devote as much of the book to destinations as planning and travel. Your best bet is probably to pull up the website for your local library and see if they have one or both of them. If you love one after checking it out, buy it.

Where do you go in Vietnam to see all the tribes in one place? The somewhat inconveniently located (but worth the trip) Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi.

Some cities you visit because of the wealth of cultural attractions and interesting sites. Few people would put Hanoi in that category. It’s a great place to visit for a lot of other good reasons instead: a historic quarter good for strolling and photos near a pretty lake, French Colonial buildings in another area, great food, and bargain prices for nearly everything. It’s also a great hopping-off base for exploring the north.

Before we got to Vietnam, a friend who used to live there said if we had a child with us, this museum should be at the top of the list. My guidebook concurred, though when we visited, there were surprisingly few foreigners there, especially compared to how many were in the crazy long line in the 38C/100F heat to see embalmed Ho Chi Minh looking waxy in his tomb.

Family, couple, or single though, it’s worth paying a few bucks for a taxi ride to this part of town to see the beautifully presented items from the 54 ethnic groups living within the country’s borders. If you head up north toward Sapa you see people from the Tay, Hmong, or Yao groups, but most visitors encounter only a fraction of the ethnic diversity. It it would be hard to catch them wearing some of the outfits on display too since some are just brought out during festivals.

The inside displays are arranged by ethnicity, generally including what’s unique about that culture’s customs, apparel, or utensils. Musical instruments and farming implements make appearances and some displays replicate the living quarters of a family. A favorite of mine was a Mekong Delta fisherman’s bicycle loaded up with more than 200 fish traps and baskets. Other displays include backpacks made from reeds and bamboo, ritual dolls, and a willow-looking tree loaded with messages to the ancestors.

There’s a whole separate outdoor section that’s more hands-on and—good for the kids—involves some climbing. The house at the very top is a traditional longhouse copied from one in the central highlands. The steps can be pulled up at night. Another communal house modeled after that of the Bahnar people was built on site here by 42 villagers from the central highlands. It stands 19 meters high and requires a steep hike up notched logs to walk around inside.

In the interest of keeping my site from getting blocked by libraries, I’ll pass on posting another naughty photo of the Giarai people’s tomb, which is surrounded by sexually explicit carvings meant to be symbols of fertility. Here’s a corner that’s tame, follow this link for one that’s not.

Of course we went to see the water puppets show by the old quarter of Hanoi, but if you time it right, they sometimes run the shows here as well. This is how the water puppets were traditionally presented, with the puppeteers standing in the hut part (in the water) behind curtains, the puppets extending out on rods.

The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is one of the best screaming bargains I came across in my return to Southeast Asia this past summer. Admission is only $1.25 for adults and 25 cents for kids in the local currency. For more info, go to vme.org.vn. To get there, take a taxi to Nguyen Van Huyen Road, Cau Giay District. It’s about 10-20 minutes from most Hanoi hotels.

Note that another section is under construction that will cover ethnic groups in all of Southeast Asia, not just Vietnam. So by the time you visit, that may be open as well.

Your turn to host the party!

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my Mexican beach house on the Gulf coast of the Yucatan. I still like the house a lot and I’m not in dire straits financially. But for two reasons it’s up for sale:

1) For family reasons we moved to Tampa Bay in July, near a string of some of the best beaches in the U.S., so having a beach house that requires a plane ride to get to is kind of silly now.

2) I’m buying a different Mexican house where we just spent a year, in Guanajuato. So some cash from here is going there.

You can read the whole description on the real estate listing at the agency site: Chuburna Beach House for Sale.

I’ll buck conventional sales wisdom and tell you the price first: $69,500. Yes indeed, just one house back from the beach, furnished, ready to move in, for less than 70 grand U.S. (Take that, House Hunters International!) Just bring a bathing suit, a t-shirt, and a toothbrush and you’re ready to go. It even comes with a hammock for your first siesta. We’ll hook you up with our caretaker/ house cleaner couple so you can rent it out remotely as well.

The house has two bedrooms (one with a double, one with two twins) a large living/kitchen area, a big covered terrace, and a bathroom. There’s a covered carport for one car.

Unlike many locations on this coast, this one is just three blocks from the town square in Chuburna. You can walk there in a few minutes and you don’t even have to get in a car to hit a restaurant or go to a convenience store. All the carrying costs are cheap: utilities have never topped $80 even when in full use all month and annual taxes are about as much as a few bottles of tequila.

You do have to pay about $600 a year for the stupid fideicomiso though, which is like a land trust tax for foreigners buying near the coast. (It doesn’t apply in the interior). There’s also not much chance of getting financing in Mexico. Most people pay cash, get a home equity loan on their main residence, or find another way to borrow some cash stateside.

The closest city is lovely Merida, with an international airport. It’s sometimes cheaper to fly to Cancun four hours away and drive or bus it. But you do have a real milllion-plus population city 40 minutes away and lots to do nearby in this land of Mayan ruins and cenotes. The town itself is usually a sleepy fishing village though, with houses not hotels. It only gets hopping on holiday weekends and part of the summer.

There are a good number of gringos in this area now if you don’t relish the idea of being stuck speaking Spanish all the time, especially in the winter when the Canadian snowbirds come down. With a homicide rate lower than 2 per 100,000, Yucatan State has a lower crime rate than nearly all of the United States and a chunk of Canada as well.

You can see video tours of the inside below and the outside here. Contact the agent for any info on buying after you visit the listing. You can also see more photos and what we get for rent at our vacation rentals listing. If you’re serious but want the inside scoop, here’s my contact info.

My wife and I have enjoyed this house, I did a lot of book writing there, and my daughter has been going to it since she was 4. She’s now 11, so obviously we liked it. It’s just not right for our future: when we return to Mexico we’re going to live there for two years, so we want to be in a city again.

You hear my opinions and advice on here enough, so this week we have a special treat instead. This is a guest post from my 10-year-old daughter Alina.

When we put a “for sale” sign in front of our house in the spring of 2010 and told our daughter we were moving to Guanajuato, Mexico for a year-long family sabbatical, she was not exactly thrilled. She adjusted though and became a fluent Spanish speaker with lots of new friends in our adopted city. One year later she now has mixed feelings about going back to the U.S. So take it away Alina—what are you going to miss and not miss about this crazy country?

Things I’ll miss about living in Mexico:

1) Festivals and celebrations all the time

2) Being able to walk to lots of places

3) Mexican food (including tortas milanesas, paletas, ice cream, natural yogurt sundaes, icing cookies, aguas frescas, limonadas, licuados, and guava juice.)

4) My school and my friends

5) Interesting and cheap stuff to buy at the markets

6) Riding on nice Primera Plus and ETN buses—they give you a snack and a drink every time!

Things I won’t miss about living in Mexico

1) Super loud music playing outside most of the time

2) Chile and Limon on everything, plus strange tasting pizza

3) Garbage on the ground almost everywhere, plus sometimes poop from dogs, donkeys, and horses

4) Going up stairs, ramps, and steep streets every day in Guanajuato

5) Mariachi music and songs with “corazon” in them

First photo of Alina by Katie Clancy, others by Tim Leffel.

I’ve seen some amazing things in my two decades of heavy travel, but when you live like a local you get to a whole new level altogether. At this point I’ve been a temporary resident of Guanajuato, Mexico for more than seven months. Here are my ten most memorable slow travel moments so far, with some images that are stuck in my mind. Enjoy!

1) Stumbling upon strange performances. The great thing about living somewhere for a while is you get more chances to discover interesting things by pure accident. I am not really sure what this performance was about, but women in traditional costumes were dancing with things on their heads while this big-headed couple busted a move in front of them. What’s not to like? Photo above, but you can check out a short video at this link.

2) Day of the Dead in Mexico is an iconic celebration that brings crowds by the busload to places like Oaxaca City and Patzcuaro. We got to see it from all angles over more than a week, however. The various aspects included special events at my daughter’s school, the making of special colored sugar candies at our language school, sugar skulls for sale in the park, and a Catrina fashion show by local government workers. Of course we topped it off with a spooky visit to the local cemetery.

3) V-day, Mexican style. It’s always fun seeing how another culture celebrates a holiday like Valentine’s Day. In Mexico, it’s not about chocolates and flowers: you’ve got to get your honey a red mylar balloon. Every bar, restaurant, and park bench was filled with couples and their assorted balloons. This shot is from in front of a bar…

4) Presents in shoes. Christmas in Mexico is not as big of a deal as in the U.S. The real celebration comes during Three Kings Day, the 12th day of Christmas. The day before we went to a mall where three dressed-up kings rode through on fake camels then a band played in the parking lot as kids received balloons they were supposed to tie wishes to before releasing. Then there was a big parade in the center on the actual day, complete with candy tossed to the crowd. At night, children leave their shoes by the door and the kings leave a present for them. It helps if you leave them a snack and a note…

5) Lots of people come to Guanajuato for the annual Cervantino Festival, catching whatever shows are going on that particular weekend. We were here for the whole five weeks, however, so we saw amazing show after amazing show. Tickets that were well worth it included an Argentine Tango show (Tangokinesis) in historic Teatro Juarez and a Manuel Barrueco classical guitar performance in a gilded gold 400-year-old church. Plus Señor Coconut and Flamenco star Vicente Amigo performed on an outdoor stage that had surprisingly good sound. Some of the free shows were just as impressive, like the bizarre Trans Express acrobat and percussion troupe from France. One thing I learned? Mexicans love clowns and mimes.

6) Every day’s a party! One morning we awoke to the sound of a blaring drum and bugle band right outside our apartment, at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. The music and noise kept increasing, so we got dressed and ventured outside to see what was going on. It turned out to be a celebration for the patron saint of our neighborhood—every barrio has its own saint—and the kids were dancing while decked out in costumes and masks. Check out this video to see them in action.

7) Front row at a Mexican Rodeo. We were pretty psyched to find out that there was a regular weekend rodeo one town over from where we were living. But then we got even more excited when we found out it was one from women! This led to a Perceptive Travel story I wrote: Sidesaddle Girls at a Mexican Rodeo. If you go to the end of that story, there’s a link to a video of the riders in action.

8) Great meals and bizarre snacks. Mexican food is one of the world’s most distinctive and varied cuisines, so I’ve had more great meals than I can count. The Mexican palate leaves something to be desired though when it comes to snack food. Candy with the taste and consistency of paper, Doritos piled with salsa and pork fat, and…green Cheetoes?

9) Lucha libre! Mexican professional wrestling is as silly and fake as it is anywhere else. But nowhere else do they have such cool masks.

10) Happy Birthday Mexico! We picked a great year to go rent an apartment in an historic city of Mexico. In 1810 the independence movement started in Dolores Hidalgo and San Miguel de Allende and the first big battle against the Spaniards happened in…Guanajuato, where I am right now. So as you can imagine, the Independence Day celebration was huge. Here’s more on the day leading up to it, then at night it was fireworks aplenty!

* This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals-sponsored travel blogging competition on slow travel memories.