copyright, The Resort at Paws Up

If your daughter is a fan of The Saddle Club,  or your son has held onto cowboy aspirations, or you never got over the fact that Santa didn’t bring the damn horse you asked for (we didn’t),  one of the luxury equestrian tours rounded up over at Forbestraveler.com might just be the trip of a lifetime for all of you.

With no skimping on the luxury aspect, these outfitters aren’t just offering just some good old trail-riding followed by a night in a so-so bunk. If you’re on the Aravalli Hill Ride offered by Ghenerao Safari Tours, for instance, you’ll be riding through villages, archaeological sites and farms of Rajasthan, India by day, while spending your evenings in palaces and small mansions that have been converted to historic “heritage” hotels. A bonus? The hotels’ aristocratic owners often live on site and will appear, as the Ghenerao Safari Tours website says, “to bore you with tales of their glorious family history.” (Um, we think something got lost in translation, but we get the drift…)

These top 10 luxury equestrian tours are all over the world, so if India isn’t on your current list of must-visits, how does France, Montana, Chile or China sound? Those are just examples: for the full article with all top ten, click here.

Copyright Hotel El Convento

You may not be the beach nuts we are. You may find that it’s a perfectly wonderful vacation if you hit Puerto Rico and never once set foot on some sand. And it’s true, there’s a lot more to this Caribbean island than hitting the ocean. For one thing, with an estimated 400 historic structures, some of which have been around since the 16th century, Old San Juan is a treasure trove of history and Spanish colonial architecture.

Hotel El Convento is but one of those structures. The hotel began life as a Carmelite convent in 1651 and was home to nuns until 1903, when costly repairs forced the then Archbishop of San Juan to give up the building. The building then went through various incarnations including a dance hall, store and outright ruin, until Robert Woolworth of Woolworth’s fame purchased it in 1959 to turn it into a hotel. Now owned by San Juan businessmen, El Convento is a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, and features Old World styling with New World comfort (think flat-panel TVs with Bose stereos). (more…)

We don’t have anything planned for Wednesdays, it’s sort of a whatever-news-is-out-there-that’s-of-interest kind of day. Or a whatever-we-feel-like-posting kind of day. And to be honest, today we don’t even feel like posting. We feel like crap. Some of you may remember that there’s a baby on the way. We’re now in our 34th week and this baby cannot come fast enough. We are big, fat and extremely uncomfortable, and now we have cramps, slight nausea, acid reflux, and slight dizziness. Oh - let us not forget the hormonal imbalance that, for some unknown reason, strikes with particular fury whenever we are at Whole Foods, where we more often than not burst into tears somewhere between the tea and the pancake mix.

So we’re out of wack. We know we’re out of wack because the thought of traveling right now makes us sick. And the thought that the thought of traveling makes us sick, makes us sick. We are in a vortex. We want this baby to come NOW so that we can get back on a plane, train or the first thing smoking out of here. But while we sit here and stew in tears and impatience, we thought we’d bring you something that might make YOU sick. Because, as they say, misery loves company.

Yesterday we read a post over at Gadling about a ride that just opened last weekend at the Kennedy Space Center, 45 minutes away from Orlando. Their new Shuttle Launch Experience simulates, of course, a launch into space. Now if you’re like me (and Neil Woodburn, who wrote the Gadling post), you’re probably thinking you’ll sit in some room, be shaken a bit in your chair, and be surrounded by pictures taken from space. Oooh, how exciting, you yawn.

You are so wrong.

This ride is for real. Not as in you actually go into space, but that’s about the only difference between what you and the astronauts go through; you will experience the pressure they feel, and probably a lot of fear that they don’t. The ride so closely resembles an actual launch that we can tell you right now there’s no way in hell we’d be on it; we’d probably throw up.

For a hilarious account by a U.K. journalist who actually went on the ride, click here. If you’re ready to take on the thrill, the ride is included in your general price of admission, which is $38 for adults and $28 for children 3 to 11. (Note, however, that kids have to be at least 48 inches tall to ride on the Shuttle Launch Experience.)

And if you get sick, don’t say we didn’t warn you.