This is Liz Atwood's Tween Tuesday:

Did you hear about the family that just concluded its visit to 52 zoos in 52 weeks? Gabe and Marla Taviano and their three daughters spent the last year visiting zoos from coast to coast, including the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. You can read about their exploits here.

The accounts I read talk about the fun they had seeing all the different animals. But having just returned from vacation myself, I'm sure the Tavianos are leaving out some of the details. How about the arguments over where to eat? What do you do when one kid is hungry for McDonald's and the other refuses to eat anything but Persian? And then, after you compromise and have McDonald's for lunch and book the Persian restaurant for dinner, you have to change the time of the reservation so as not to conflict with the season premier of Monk. And what about the demand for a restroom break just minutes after leaving the hotel? And let's not forget the pleas for stopping at every souvenir shop you see. I wonder how many stuffed animals the Tavianos crammed into their suitcases.

But all in all, despite the occasional tween/teen trantrum, we had a nice vacation.  We visited Arizona and traveled the state from the Grand Canyon in the north to Tombstone in the south. Before we got there, my younger son had declared that "Indians aren't his thing." But when we stopped by a souvenir stand on the Navajo reservation, he begged for a necklace with an arrowhead and wore it the entire trip. And while the older boy refused to watch any Western movies I had rented before the trip, he was thrilled to walk down the streets of Tombstone with a toy gun and pretend he was Wyatt Earp.

I'm glad they have a new appreciation for the West and it's history, but I don't expect we'll be taking any cross-country excursions anytime soon.

What's your secret to traveling with the kids?