Oct. 31 is my favourite day of the year. Unlike most holidays and observances, when tradition demands the use of tinsel, fake hay and layered poultry (Turduken anyone?), Halloween lets my creativity run wild when it comes to costumes, decorations, treats and blender drinks (don’t ask). Can you name another day when you can cut five holes in a sofa cushion and attend a party dressed as Idaho? My point exactly.
One of these years, however, I will combine my love of Halloween with an Oct. 31 pilgrimage to one of these spots:
New Orleans
Halloween rivals Fat Tuesday in what’s known as “America’s Most Haunted City,” what with all the French Quarter’s spooky cemeteries and centuries of voodoo lore. Newer additions include the Voodoo Experience music festival, which has a pretty darned spectacular line-up this year. Throw in Mardi Gras-esque parades (pictured at left) and after-hours parties with names like “Vampire Stripper Sluts from Outer Space,” and, um, how much would a last-minute flight cost? Just asking.

Las Vegas
Oct. 31 is when Sin City nails down its reputation. Just about every Vegas attraction, from Madame Tussauds to Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, embraces the Halloween theme by adding ghost tours, haunted houses and the like. But it’s the adult entertainment that will make jaws drop. And why not? Oct. 31 is a holiday in Nevada (it’s “Statehood Day”). The kicker this year: Phish is playing the MGM Grand Garden Arena. The bad news: Resale tickets start at more than $400 online. Damn you pathetic freelance income! Damn you to hell!

The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colo.
Plenty of hotels are said to be haunted, but how many of them inspired the creepiest suite of all time? Turns out Stephen King came up with the idea for his classic horror novel, The Shining, in Room 217 of this neo-Georgian Rocky Mountain property (pictured below), which has since hosted TV crews for Ghost Hunters and The Shining mini-series. Then there's Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, arguably the scariest movie ever. None it of was actually shot at the Stanley. The similar Timberline Lodge in Oregon provided exterior views, but apparently requested that Kubrick change the sinister room number in King's novel so customers wouldn't avoid the real Room 217. Little did they know that fans of the franchise would flock to the Stanley and Timberline, as well as to the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, whose interior inspired much of the movie's set decoration.

Long Beach, Calif.
Good on this Californian city for making the best of a scary situation. The RMS Queen Mary ocean liner, retired from service and moored in Long Beach harbour since 1967, has been the site of numerous murders, drownings, fatal naval accidents and other grisly goings on, and has earned a reputation as a paranormal hot spot. Throw in some eye-popping costumes, props and pyrotechnics, along with fright-filled mazes and creepy live bands, and you’ve got the annual Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor extravaganza (pictured below).

Avebury, England
For a look at how some people take Oct. 31 very seriously, head to this English village where a giant Neolithic stone circle snakes through town. For certain pagan groups, Halloween is known as Samhain, and marks the turning of the calendar from light into dark. At this time of year Avebury’s standing stones draw druids (pictured below) from all over the world to conduct strange rituals that always seem to involve weird headgear. So strap on some elk antlers — I know mine are around here somewhere — and get a sneak peek at some epic weirdness.

France’s A10 autoroute between Paris and Orleans reminds me of Highway 401 between Toronto and Kingston. Both are mostly flat and featureless, with anything that breaks the monotony coming as a welcome relief.

Along the 401, these breaks come in the form of the Big Apple, the verdant hills of Northumberland County, and CFB Trenton’s roadside fighter jet. Along the A10, meanwhile, there’s the largest wind farm in France.

Watching its towering turbines align ahead of me, their spinning white blades overlapping to dizzying effect, reminded me of two things: One, it's no longer surprising to see wind farms dot the landscape; and two, they really are quite beautiful.

A week later, standing atop England’s White Horse Hill, I had the same thought when I noticed a line of them dotting the horizon (pictured above...look closely!). (This, combined with the recent demise of nearby Didcot Power Station, can only be a positive sign when it comes to renewable energy.) Then there are the Ontario road trips I've taken over the past two summers — to Sauble Beach, Kingston, Ottawa and Windsor — which have led me past hundreds of the spinning turbines. The same goes for recent international forays through upstate New York, Costa Rica (pictured below) and Ireland.

Never has a wind farm struck me as ugly, or detracted from the natural beauty of its surroundings. Quite the opposite: They usually serve as eye-catching landmarks, especially since their locations — along the A10, for example — tend to be flat and fairly featureless.

Not everyone will share my views on wind farms' aesthetic appeal. A surprising amount of controversy surrounds these installations — centred on issues such as health and bird deaths — given that their purpose is to provide the renewable energy our planet obviously needs.

But controversy breeds curiosity, which must be part of the reason for the proliferation of wind-farm tours. Staff at the 86-turbine project on Wolfe Island near Kingston, for example, will show groups of 10 or more around (depending on availability), with a self-guided tour map available for smaller groups. In Michigan, home to 900-plus turbines, the town of Ludington runs $10 bus tours of the Lake Winds Energy Park in summer and fall.

In Prince Edward Island, the North Cape Wind Farm Gift Shop and Interpretive Centre attracts 60,000 visitors a year (according to its website), while Manitoba's St. Leon Interpretive Centre offers walking tours.

Then there's the Eye of the Wind turbine atop Grouse Mountain near Vancouver (pictured below), which lets visitors take in alpine views from a glass viewing pod just below its massive blades. It's even worth checking out the informative panels at the base of WindShare's 91-metre-tall turbine in Toronto's Exhibition Place, which was the first turbine installed in a major North American city centre when it went up in 2002.

So next time my eyes start glazing over as I speed down the 401, I’ll take a detour to Wolfe Island. And should my wind farm tour conclude with a couple scoops of “keylime blast” ice cream from Café Tenango, well, so be it…

It was never pretty, aesthetically or environmentally. To be honest, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better example of a blot on the landscape, what with the landscape in question being so pleasing to the eye. 
I spent much of my childhood bouncing between the homes of grandparents, cousins and summer friends in Drayton, Sutton Courtney, Steventon, and the other villages and towns on and around England's rolling Wiltshire Downs. I've been back several times as an adult -- twice as a father -- and still revel in revisiting the diversions of my youth: The Uffington White Horse prehistoric hill figure; Wittenham Clumps, a pair of wooded hills and ancient forts; the footpaths around the Thames weirs at Sutton Courtney; and even the modest Sutton Wick duck pond in Drayton (pictured below), where both sets of grandparents lived across the High Street from each other.  
This is one of the most underrated parts of England. Millions of visitors take day trips from London to the Cotswold Hills and Stonehenge -- both less than an hour's drive from the Drayton Triangle, as I call it -- as well as to Oxford, the world-famous university city 20 minutes north. It could be that Didcot Power Station (pictured above), the concrete monstrosity that rose over the region in the late 1960s to near-universal dismay and distain, has caused tourists to bypass the area. If so, I owe it a debt of gratitude for the uncrowded pubs, serene villages and countryside (pictured below), and lack of tour buses in the Triangle.
These days, I also derive great pleasure from bringing my daughters along, and watching as they gaze wide-eyed at the White Horse's 110-metre-long chalk body (pictured below), or hurl crusts of bread into the swirling Thames, drawing ducks by the dozens.
Relatives who still live in the Triangle chuckle when I outline our repetitive itinerary. It probably seems strangely quaint -- boring, even -- when compared with the iconic sights of London or even those of Oxford. But I will never tire of the Triangle, or of reliving those halcyon days and sharing them with my family. 
Next time we visit, however, something will be missing. Part of it is already gone: In the early morning of July 27, the three southern cooling towers of Didcot A -- the coal-fired plant; Didcot B is fueled with natural gas -- were spectacularly demolished. (The rest of the coal plant will apparently be taken down brick by brick over the next few years.)
I would have liked to have been among the thousands of spectators who turned out for the implosion. My late grandfather Harry, however, would have been there no matter what. He despised the power station. An avid painter of English landscapes, he resented its grey brooding presence. But when I saw its plump concrete smoke stacks loom over the horizon on the way from Heathrow, I knew that a summer of non-stop fun was about the begin.
Granddad Bisby invariably excluded it from his bucolic watercolours. But if I'm ever feeling nostalgic, I may just Photoshop it in.

Nothing brings joy to my heart like seeing my kids haul their own luggage.

For several years now, road trips have meant jamming the family SUV with portable high chairs, tiny skates, plastic beach paraphernalia, and, yes, an actual toy kitchen sink, and then having to unpack it all when we reached our destinations. My wife Angela and I could easily have been mistaken for Himalayan sherpas when taking a flight with the brood, what with the diaper bags and suitcase overflow hanging from our beleaguered extremities.

But now, finally, my two daughters, aged 4 and 7, will pull their own weight -- literally -- when we head to France and England later today (more on that to come). And it's all thanks to a pair of adorable rolling suitcases (pictured above) that they actually want to lug.

The owl- and bee-themed Skip Hop luggage they received from a globetrotting aunt at Christmas has gone over like gangbusters. Heck, they pulled Lego bricks and stray cats around the house until we took an out-of-town winter trip. And then, oh, the rapture as they, not I, rolled an inordinate quantity of crayons and Play-Doh into our hotel room.

The only disappointment I felt was that I hadn't acquired some child-friendly luggage sooner. There's plenty out there: U.K.-based LittleLife, for example, offers a nifty trio of animal-themed "Wheelie Duffles" -- the bee is pictured below -- that will hold almost twice as much Lego as the Skip Hop options. 

That said, these rolling suitcases are pretty tame when compared with, say, most of what Trunki makes. Distributed in Canada by Melissa & Doug, the U.K.-based star of a Dragon's Den episode got its start in 2006 with an innovative wheeled riding suitcase vaguely shaped like an, um, cow? (To be honest, I'm not sure what Terrence, pictured below, is.) Regardless, Terrence has since morphed into similarly impressionistic bees, tigers, fire engines and more.

There's also the Skoot line of ride-on luggage (pictured below) offered by Mastermind Toys, which actually looks a lot like a vintage motor scooter with handlebars that make the case more maneuverable.

Just as adult strollers -- under certain circumstances -- can seem appealing, a pair of riding suitcases for mom and dad might not be a bad idea. Oh, wait, they've already invented one.