Hyatt Hotels & Resorts has entered the world of reality TV, sort of. Their version of it – the Hyatt Resorts Ultimate Adventure Challenge – will be shown on the web, and if you’re up for that sort of thing, you and the fam can enter to be chosen as participants. All you need to do, apparently, is send in a video of your children showing, in Hyatt’s own words, “their passion for adventure and exploration.” (We live in fear of the “adventure and exploration” that happens in our house on a daily basis, but we have a feeling they’re looking for more outdoorsy material…)

From the entries received, 5 families will be chosen to compete against each other in a series of webisodes, doing God-only-knows-what, and the family with the most votes from the public wins. The grand prize? 50 free nights at any Hyatt hotel or resort worldwide.

While 50 free nights is a lovely prize – and Hyatt does have some wonderful properties – we’re not sure that we personally want to go this route to achieve it: the prize may be luxury but the means of achieving is decidedly not so. (Then again, neither are lottery tickets…) Anyhow, should the cheese factor be deterring you from entering a video of Junior swinging dangerously from the chandelier, know that 1 lucky voter will also be chosen to win the grand prize in addition to the winning family, so at the least you can go online and vote and have a chance at winning while maintaining some dignity.  But if you’re ready to put your game face on and enter, and you happen to get picked to vie for the prize, let us know – we’ll vote for you.

All of a sudden, the daughter has developed a fascination with sea life. It’s not that she didn’t like the aquatic species before, but all of a sudden, there’s been increasing talk of whales, seahorses and the like, which often crescendos to pleas to go and see some soon.

Of course, given that we want to shut her up please her, we’ve been looking up cool aquarium trips where we could indulge our desire for luxury travel while visiting a fish or two. We posted one a while back from England, and also told you about the seahorse farm in Hawaii, but figured we could surely tackle this request in the continental U.S. Here are some hotel packages we’ve found (that as always, are in destinations and/or hotels where you’ll have a good time too).

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