Nothing impresses a young boy more than an aircraft carrier full of authentic WWII aircraft. The grand scale of this ship alone is destined to make an impression. Visitors enter the ship, sit through a brief safety briefing, and can then explore the open areas on their own or in smaller guided tour groups.

The carrier is not for the frail or physically timid, or for those chasing small children. Even accessing the main areas (other than the main deck and flight deck) involves steep staircases and narrow walkways at considerable heights.

But if you're game for an adventure, visiting the Hornet will impress upon your youngster that those who serve in the military do so at great personal expense. The living quarters are impressionably sparse, the planes impressive and menacing, and the exhibits pay homage to those who lost their lives in military service.

Also on display are exhibits showcasing the Apollo 11 and 12 missions, which were recovered by the USS Hornet, with fascinating historical video and the quarantine trailers where the astronauts were sequestered after their landing.

The depth of history in the ship is palpable. If your children have an appetite for adventure, a good pair of walking (and climbing) shoes, and can be patient with areas being inaccessible due to lack of docents, this is a great museum to visit.

After my youngest developed a fixation with all things ancient Egypt and exhausted our local library's limited collection of books on the subject, we found to our surprise that San Jose's Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum is home to the largest selection of Egyptian artifacts on display in Western North America.

Located in a tranquil residential neighborhood, the museum features the convenience of free parking adjacent to the building (at Naglee and Chapman), a lovingly landscaped courtyard with fountain that provides an ideal place for a picnic, and a large but manageable collection of artifacts that will amaze the young (or adult) Egyptologist.

The main attraction is a replica of a tomb which you can walk through, viewing the burial chamber and corridors, as long as your child will brave the dim light at the entrance to the unknown. Also on display are plenty of mummies, including those of cats and monkeys, plenty of artifacts representing religious and daily life, jewelry, and other relics.

Don't miss the lifesized version of the ancient (and fairly simple) Egyptian game, Senet, located in the outdoor courtyard, where you can play with your family and the Alice in Wonderland-sized game pieces.

Admission to the museum is $9 for adults, $5 for ages 5-10, and free for the youngest. Don't miss it!

Located in the Jamaica Bay Inn, abutting Mothers' Beach in Marina del Rey, Vu distinguishes itself from the standard hotel restaurant with its inventive approach to cuisine, executed by its visionary chef, Kyle Schutte.

While the lunch and dinner menus at Vu are decidedly highbrow, and not for the faint-of-heart, featuring mostly small plates with unusual ingredients (root beer jello or pink lemonade mayonnaise, anyone?) and feats of culinary alchemy, the atmosphere is as relaxed as you will find at a gourmet restaurant. The interior design is roomy and open, with plenty of space between tables. The beachfront patio offers a relatively comfortable venue for fine dining with children in tow, and the restaurant is notable especially for its eponymous marina view, which will keep kids occupied for a time as they watch novice paddleboarders attempt to achieve a measure of balance.

Adults without an adventuresome palate may find themselves peering over their children's shoulders at the kids' menu, offered at all meals. Lunch and dinner offerings for the younger set are conventional almost to a fault: the standard pizza, pasta, chicken fingers and burgers are featured. You may want to consider ordering the kids' PB&J as a palate cleanser after your first course 'PB&J', which on the adult menu stands for pate, brioche, and jam.

While the restaurant makes some attempts to provide accessibility to families wishing to dine together, this is not a family restaurant. The service on our visits was slow enough to try the patience of our oldest child, and the acoustics of the dining room are unfriendly to those with children prone to loud outbursts or possessing the propensity to use forks as percussion instruments.

The best time to enjoy Vu with children is at breakfast, especially if you are staying in the hotel. Breakfast offerings, while lacking the creative virtuosity of the other menus, are pleasing enough, and the dining room tends to be sparsely populated. Kids and adults can enjoy pancakes, which weren't remarkable from a taste or texture standpoint, but were comforting in their familiarity, despite the watery syrup. The addictive home fries are tasty and crispy, and if you're trying to eat healthfully, there is a fruit plate for the kids, and granola with berries and tangy Greek yogurt for parents.

Overall, Vu is an elegant restaurant with imaginative cuisine, probably best experienced by you and your partner on 'date night'. However, if you can't get a sitter, you can dress casually, take the kids along with you, and if necessary, you and your partner can alternate strolling with the kids on the beach. After all, isn't that how most meals with young children end up anyhow? Forget romance, you just want to finish your meal and feed the kids their PB&J. This, at least, can be accomplished at Vu. And then, you can check in upstairs and try again at breakfast...

Disclosure: This review is based on a complimentary meal at Vu. I received no other compensation and the business owner did not state any requirements that I express a particular point of view. The opinions I express are entirely my own.

The improbably tranquil dockside community of Marina del Rey is the setting for the elegant yet unpretentious Jamaica Bay Inn, a newly rebuilt hotel which highlights its prime beachfront locale with understated tropical décor and plenty of amenities. The Inn ambitiously seeks to provide a resort-like experience, and it serves as a pleasant sanctuary for families on vacation or an ideal base for exploring the attractions of urban Los Angeles.

Highlights of our stay:
*Friendly, helpful, and down-to-earth staff
*Comfortable rooms with premium mattresses and bed linens
*Beautiful scenic outlook from the Marina-view rooms
*Convenient location, with some eateries and shops in walking distance
*Steps from Mothers’ Beach
*Full-sized balconies

The Downside:
*Pool area wasn’t particularly child-friendly
*Exercise Room was basic and small
*No bathtub in many rooms

ROOMS:
The rooms at the Jamaica Bay Inn are impeccable and attractively appointed. Standard rooms are available with a City or Marina view, with two queens or one king-sized bed. Rooms feature a full-sized patio or balcony with surprisingly clean and comfortable patio furniture, which we used as our ‘dining room’ to eliminate in-room crumbs. Balconies on the Marina side offer a stunning vista, well worth the slight premium, and our view from the top floor was especially lovely. The City-side rooms with patios bordering the parking lot offer less privacy and rather homely vantage points, but still provide a securely fenced-in bit of the outdoors. For our family, the two can’t-live-without hotel features are wireless Internet access and a refrigerator, and our room rewarded us with both. Free Wi-Fi in every room is one of the hotel’s above-average provisions, and our room abounded with other considerate touches, such as two free water bottles, luxuriously soft bed linens, and extra-firm mattresses. Rooms were just spacious enough to set up a crib (or the kids’ sleeping bags) without too much furniture rearranging. The hotel was also notably quiet, with the exception of oddly resonant door latches.

The only disadvantages of our room were that the beds were unusually high, which tempted our kids to ‘skydive’, from which we dissuaded them in the interest of those on lower floors and to avoid potential injury. Also, our bathroom lacked a tub, although we managed to shower off our sandy school-aged children adequately in the oversized gentle ‘rain’ shower.

For those traveling with larger families, or larger budgets, Jamaica Bay offers two-room suites, complete with two full bathrooms, sleeper sofa, two televisions, balcony, and both tub and shower. Sometimes, there is nothing like having that extra wall to divide up your family...

THE EXPERIENCE:
Jamaica Bay can be a destination on its own or serve as a base for further adventures. Mothers’ Beach is steps away with its stretch of surf-free marina water and ample (if not pristinely clean) sandy beach. Beachfront amenities include shaded picnic areas, a comprehensive playground, and high-season lifeguards. The placid waters of the Marina are an ideal place to try kayaking or paddleboarding. Equipment rentals are available nearby, and we were offered a trial paddleboard run by a friendly beach-blanket neighbor. My kids loved having the independence to wade into the shallow water to fill their own buckets without concern about waves. Clean beachside bathrooms are a luxury, located on the outside of the hotel, along with an outdoor shower with spray nozzle, the best tool ever for rinsing off sand-encrusted children. The hotel offers bicycle rentals (for two hours or all day) for those who prefer land-based activity, or who want a green form of transportation to nearby Venice or Santa Monica.

Enough establishments are located within walking distance of the hotel to allow your car to remain parked through much of your stay, a rarity in Southern California. Within a short walk are a bagel shop, a café, and several restaurants, including the child-pleasing Cheesecake Factory. The Venice fishing pier and nearby oceanfront beaches are a heartier walk, but still reachable on foot for those with school-aged (or older) children and not too much paraphernalia. Everything else in metro Los Angeles is a short drive away, depending, of course, on traffic.

POOL AND SERVICES:
The pool at Jamaica Bay was disappointingly adult-oriented. The no-frills heated rectangular pool starts at a depth of three and a half feet, a daunting face level for our preschooler, and quickly deepens from there. Although young kids can hang out on the steps, the pool doesn’t beckon to the timid or very young swimmer. There is a hot tub, and plenty of lounge chairs, tables and umbrellas. A poolside menu and beverages are offered until 7 p.m., but we found that this only increased the ‘resort’ vibe of the pool area. Although I’m sure we were imagining the impatient glances of the childless couples sunbathing silently with their pina coladas, we felt much more welcome on the rough-and-tumble beach.

The ‘Fitness Center’ was also a letdown for the active adults in our family. With five creaky machines and a tiny window, the closet-like environs didn’t help with our vacation fitness goals. At such a beautiful outdoor venue, we were probably culpable for attempting to exercise indoors, but still…

DINING:
Jamaica Bay’s on-site restaurant, Vu, is a destination in itself (please see my separate review). Unlike the typical bland hotel restaurant, Vu offers up imaginative culinary offerings to please discriminating diners. Vu’s dinner menu is a mix of daring small plates (pink lemonade mayo and root beer jello appear in two separate creations) and innovative California cuisine. The restaurant’s views are gorgeous, the décor is artful, and the patio with its fire pits and gentle breezes is likely one of the easiest fine dining experiences to undertake with children in tow, especially if your room is right upstairs. We found the service a bit leisurely for our kids’ level of patience, but this was balanced by the complete (and more traditional) children’s menu available at all meals. The room service menu is likewise more interesting than most, with reasonably affordable kids’ menu items, and some healthy breakfast items.

Generally, we found the Jamaica Bay Inn to be surprisingly affordable and quite luxurious. We were welcomed by attentive staff and treated wonderfully by everyone we encountered. While this hotel lacks the overt glamour of some of its competitors (the Ritz is just up the street), it does have an earthy, comfortable feel which makes it ideal for families looking for an oasis of calm.

Disclosure: This review is based on a complimentary stay at the Jamaica Bay Inn. I received no other compensation and the business owner did not state any requirements that I express a particular point of view. The opinions I express are entirely my own.

Lanna Thai is the type of restaurant that you can drive by for years before ever venturing to cross its threshold. However, it is also the type of restaurant that will guarantee that once you do cross that threshold, you will have no choice but to become a regular customer and toreturn time and time again

Lanna Thai reliably serves up a comprehensive menu of fresh, inspired, and artistic Thai creations at reasonable prices in a surprisingly elegant but still casual ambiance. The focus is on the hand-prepared food, and the pride the chefs take in these dishes is evident in every detail, from the attractive presentation on oversize geometric dishes to the final garnish of fresh herbs and tasty sauces. There is a wide array of choices on the menu, including noodle dishes, stir-fries, curries, and traditional appetizers. Prices are affordable, with the majority of dishes available for under $10.

Unlike many Asian eateries, Lanna Thai offers a kids' menu, on which kids can choose from a very generous plate of Pad Thai, a chicken satay with rice and spring rolls, or chicken wings with rice and spring rolls.

Despite its convenient but unimpressive location in a strip mall just off I-580, the interior of Lanna Thai manages a rough elegance. The furnishings are unremarkable, but perhaps because of the owners' pride in this establishment, it doesn't feel like your average take-out restaurant, but instead invites the customer to stay and enjoy their meal while the attentive staff attends to them.

A good place to visit with kids, especially if you'd like to help your kids expand their taste horizons and develop a respect for finer dining, but in a casual and unpretentious setting.