Book Review: Adventures Around Cincinnati

If are you local to Cincinnati/ Kentucky/ Indiana area and have kids in your life this book is for you! Whether you are a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle etc. Adventures Around Cincinnati – A Parent’s Guide to Unique and Memorable Places to Explore with your Kids will give you the ideas needed to create lasting memories with your family!! The authors, Laura and Terry, are two local mamas who started taking adventures with their kids and thought it would be great to share their experiences with other local families.

The book has a fabulous, easy to follow layout so it is an easy read regardless of how busy and chaotic your schedule is. We have toddlers so we KNOW how hard it is to pick up a book and get anywhere with it! We both find our quiet time is on the potty… I know it is bad, but you know it’s true!

Part One: Creating Memories with Your Family

• Here Laura and Terry share their experiences and give advice on how to plan and execute your adventures. They talk about planning adventures in your calendar just like any other obligation you have for the week/ month. This allows for the kids to know their “adventure schedule”, gives them something to look forward to and it can help you to follow through with taking the kiddos on that outing because it is already scheduled into your calendar! Let’s face it, we are SO busy that if we don’t schedule fun time with our families it MAY NEVER HAPPEN! 

Part Two: Attraction Listings

• In this section, they share a listing of over 80 kid-tested attractions within a two hour drive from Cincinnati. This part totally rocks because they have included (in each attraction) contact information, cost, hours, age recommendations, stroller-friendliness, and length of a typical visit. They have also included little comments at the end of each attraction that you can consider before visiting.
• A cool example of an attraction they have listed that I would have NEVER known about is a Cincinnati/ Northern Ky International Airport Tour where you kids get to sit in the cockpit of a real jet, visit the airport fire dept, police station, interrogation rooms and jail cells! How amazingly fun for kids and educational too!!

Part Three: Planning Help

• In this last part, they have cleverly organized all the attractions into different categories to help you plan your trips, along with what attractions are FREE, what area etc. so you can create personalized itineraries that would best suit your family. This section is great because they have laid out sample itineraries for summer and the year (mixing in trips from different categories to create an all encompassing experience) that will get you on the move with your kids without you having to put in a great deal of planning!