vacations

When summer finally rolls around and you have some extra daylight on your hands, it’s a good time to escape to somewhere wet. It could be to a beach, lake, river or even a neighborhood pool. But my advice is to skip all the places everyone goes and try something new.

Notice to travelers: If your family is traveling with three generations, it’s a multigenerational trip, according to AARP. One third of travelers have made multi-gen travel a family tradition because it provides quality time together. I can relate.

I’m always surprised when I hear friends or colleagues say that their families rarely get together for reunions. That’s because between me and my husband, there are at least a couple to choose from every year. So we usually pick one and set aside some vacation time for it.

I love helping to spread the news about our AARP travel surveys, which explore people 45-plus and their vacation and travel habits. On more than one occasion, I find myself on the wrong side of the research, and I try to adjust. I had one of those self-adjustments this month around multigenerational travel. The most recent survey found that almost half of the folks surveyed planned to take a multigenerational trip in the next 12 months. I wasn’t in that category, so I decided to change that.

Zip-lining through a cloud forest. Yoga in a butterfly sanctuary. Local, freshly ground coffee strained through a burlap filter.

By Stephanie Miles

I have to admit I am one of those people who never uses all my vacation time each year. I feel like work will pile up when I'm gone, and I'll be more frazzled on my return than before I left. I'm not alone in leaving my vacation time on the table, either. The average worker in the U.S. gets 13 days of paid vacation a year, but only 57 percent of Americans use it all.

Here we are rocking and rolling down the coast out of Seattle, not with a band, but aboard an Amtrak train that bumps, jumps, sways, jerks and hurtles all at the same time, knocking me around like a dog in a shipping crate thinking that at any moment I might go airborne.

Before you pack your swimsuit, check out the latest report card on U.S. beaches with the least and most pollution.

Will everything be ready to launch President Obama's health care law by the Oct. 1 deadline? We're getting mixed signals.