Halloween Costumes for Travel

You know how I always like to travel around Halloween. It's not just because it's cheaper for me to take a trip then, but also because we're often somewhere that we can dress up and have fun, like Disney. If you also plan to travel near or on Halloween and want to wear a costume that doesn't take up a bunch of space in your carry-on bag (because checking a bag to accommodate a costume means you might as well have bought one once you get there), then I've found some great ideas that will make you look festive, but with minimal extra items.

Anyone can be a witch or Where's Waldo. Those aren't all that creative, but will do in a pinch. We like to try a little harder. Some of our past costumes have been: ice cream man, baseball fan, burglar and safari-goer.

I love this airline tarmac worker costume from TravelingMom.com. A vest takes up virtually no space and you can easily make flashlight cones from a pool noodle, which will fit conveniently in your bag or can be purchased at your destination.

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Got a black and white or blue and white striped shirt? You're probably going to pack a pair of matching pants or a skirt, so why not get yourself a beret and a matching scarf (a long scrap of fabric can work) and go as a french person, possibly not as sexy as this one:

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I also like this adorable little French dude: 

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Go with it and be a tourist. If you're traveling in a place that is warm, it's even easier, especially since you probably already have a map, a hat and your camera. We always bring khaki pants or shorts, because they go with everything. Toss in a Hawaiian shirt and you've got it down. Easy peasy.

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Everyone has room for an extra t-shirt in their bag. Turn yourself into a treasure map with this cool tutorial from Beantown Baker. Add a fun accessory, like a spyglass, an eye patch, a bandana or a sparkly red X glued to a barrette for your hair. 

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Be a hero to women everywhere and dress as Rosie the Riveter. If you're like most women in the world, you own a chambray shirt and a pair of jeans. Add a bandana and a slick of red lipstick and you're done. You don't even have to do your hair. Bonus!

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Be a more traditional hero - a superhero. Everyone loves Superman and you can be Clark Kent as Superman so easy. Any pants you've brought can work, pack a button-down shirt (or borrow one from your travel companion) and toss in a Superman t-shirt. Wear it underneath the open shirt (that you tuck in) and find a cheap pair of black-rimmed glasses. You can also be Supergirl, as lady below. Check Target next time you're there and pick up a Superman tee for cheap.

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This one relies mostly on makeup. Wear the jeans you brought and pack an old flannel shirt (or one you love and planned to wear anyway). The only thing you'll need to buy is a floppy hat and voila! You're a scarecrow, you know, with this makeup tutorial. This one is fun, because it's also unisex. Want to make it a little more realistic, buy some straw-colored yarn or pipecleaners and make some "straw" bracelets with pieces sticking out of your cuffs.

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When I go somewhere that might be cold, I almost always have a black sweater with me. It goes with everything. Make a run to the craft store and get some felt to make a circle and a big number 8 and go as a Magic 8 Ball. This is genius, whether you're pregnant or not...and is seriously easy to pull off for everyone.

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Guys, do you have a leather jacket? If you do, poof your hair and don a white tee and some jeans and go as The Fonz. Aaaaaaa! Thumbs up!

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I love food. I mean, who doesn't? I was inspired by this adorable little kid as spaghetti. You could easily make this for adults on a much smaller scale. Make a headpiece of spaghetti yarn, add some pom pom "meatballs" on top, wear a red shirt and possibly make a meatball necklace and wear a checkered napkin like a tablecloth. I like this idea so much, I might use it for my next trip to Disney's Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.

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So, there are some of my new favorite costumes for your travels. If you've worn any of these or have other ideas, I'd love to know. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and even though I have more costumes than I know what to do with, but that doesn't mean I don't want more. Where will you be this Halloween?

Fun Ways to Celebrate Fall and Halloween

Can you believe fall is almost here? Now's the best time to travel to a lot of places, because airfare and hotel deals are less expensive than other times of the year. We tend to do a lot of things in the fall, including going on our big yearly vacation. It saves us money this way and the kids are all in school, so there are smaller crowds and fewer lines everywhere we go. Want to make the most out of your fall? Then here are some fun ways to celebrate the season and Halloween.

Our dog Rikka conferring with Eric on which way to go

Head to New England
There are few places where you can go that are truly scary, but the New England area has a ton of history that includes witches, horror writers, massacres and more. This post gives you all the awesome things to do there. Rent a car, stay for a few weeks and drive to all kinds of awesome stuff.

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Hit up New Orleans
New Orleans is quite exciting and not just during Mardi Gras. There are plenty of things to do in the fall, especially considering the spooky vibe of the city including the history of voodoo and vampire legends. here are some fun things to check out. For haunted experiences, you may want to visit these 5 places:

• The Omni Royal Hotel - Once the building for the city’s slave market and the site of great brutality, the hotel is now a grand place to stay and home to many spirits. 
• The Bourbon Orleans - This former orphanage run by nuns still has kids running along its corridors. Guests have reported hearing children’s voices, seeing nuns in the hallways and feeling electrical charges near the stairwells.
• Brennan’s New Orleans - A staple of the city since 1946, Brennan’s is not only a highly rated fine dining establishment, but it also has its own ghosts. In the Red Room, a man living in the building hanged himself after murdering his family. 
• The Pharmacy Museum - Set on the site of the very first apothecary shop, the Pharmacy Museum holds a wide variety of cures and artifacts from old medical practices and voodoo rituals, including ghastly instruments used in the past for dentistry, many by the former owner, a dentist known to conduct grisly experiments on patients.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 - Nearly everyone has heard of the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau and you can visit her tomb in New Orleans’ most haunted cemetery. Hundreds of thousands are buried in this one square block, with the tombs being reused over and over. 

Pumpkin harvest

I don't really get excited by pumpkin carving. That might be a little weird for someone who loves Halloween as much as I do. I just don't find it fun and I don't make pies, but often the harvest festivals are full of pumpkin-picking and other activities like hayrides, squash-tossing, farm animals and more. If you find a corn maze, it's not unusual for there to be pumpkin harvest festivities going on nearby. Kids love to run and pick out the pumpkin they will use for their jack-o-lantern at home and also enjoy running and around and climbing on things. We have farms that feature hay bale pyramids and tours on a farm train. Usually these days out are fairly affordable and you can even sign up to receive coupons when the celebration starts.

Corn maze

I look forward to the corn mazes all year long. It's so fun to go out and spend an afternoon on local farms and get lost in a maze of maize! We pack up the car with a change of clothes and the dog and hope there's no mud where we will have to use our extra clothes. The mazes test our ability to read a map or our trivia knowledge. While other families split up and race each other through the maze, we view it as a fun family outing and the three of us go together. Sometimes we just let the dog go and pick our course and sometimes we use whatever clues they give us at the beginning. After we emerge from the corn, we make a trip to the gift shop, grab something warm to eat and drink and then head home. There are always great photo ops.

Farmers' market

This is similar to you-pick farms, except you can just go with your list and have fun finding them at the different stalls. Another plus to the markets is that you are getting affordable local foods and you can usually pick up lunch from any number of food merchants there, too. Our market up the street is a great place to get everything from crepes to tamales. When you're traveling, it's a perfect way to stock your fridge with healthy options for snacks and side dishes.

Fruit picking

I love fresh fruits and vegetables. I also love to visit local farms. I'm always amazed by what people can grow. I have my own garden, but it's not big and awesome, so I like to get ideas on how to make it better. Many of these farms let you go pick your own fresh produce. You pay by the pound and often they have a store where they sell jams, sauces and other things they make on-site. These make great gifts and souvenirs as well.

Wine and beer festivals

Right after the grape and wheat harvests come the festivals! Food, wine, beer, you name it. Fall has tons of wine and beer celebrations everywhere they serve such things. Find new favorites when you can sample all the local (and some not-so-local) varietals and brews. Most of these fests require you to buy a glass for your samples, so you already have a built-in souvenir, too!

Head Underground

Lots of weird stuff happens underground. Here are three I greatly enjoy:

• The Shanghai Tunnels under Portland. They were featured on Travel Channel’s 10 Most Haunted. Though it came in at number 10, it was the only Portland site to make the list, so by simple reasoning, it must make it Portland’s most haunted site. I was disappointed that I didn’t experience so much as a cold breeze, nor did I catch anything on my camera, unless you count dust particles catching the light of my flash and presenting themselves as “glowing orbs”, but maybe you'll be luckier (if you think it's lucky to see/feel a ghost) than I. 
• The Dungeons are on my list of kitchy and kinda scary (if you're afraid of the dark and mirror mazes where you might be followed) and must-do attractions. The site offers best price guarantee and you can get discounted deals if you purchase a combination ticket with Madame Tussaud's and/or the London Eye. If you plan to visit off-peak hours, you can save up to 50%! You must purchase your tickets online though. Each dungeon (located in London, York, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and now San Francisco) walks you through the "streets" of history and winds you through creepy stories and rides that take you from one area of the dungeon to another.
• Paris Catacombs. There are miles of underground tunnels underneath Paris full of human bones that were put there when the cemeteries became overcrowded. Even now they are still crowded, but with tourists. Get there right at opening and beat the crowds. Lines can stretch up to 2 hours long and with prices at only 5 Euros per person, it's one of the cheaper things you can do in France. I just realized I never did a post on my trip into the catacombs, so that will be coming in the near future.

Go to a theme park
Most theme parks have a Halloween celebration of some sort. Here are the top ones, including how to save on admission if there's a way to:

• Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party. Many park days at the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland in Sept-Nov are cut short for this party that requires a special ticket to get in. From 7pm to midnight, many of the park guests come dressed in costume to enjoy 5 hours of trick-or-treating, dancing, nighttime thrill rides (only specific rides will be open during that time, not the whole park), Hall-o-wishes fireworks display, an all-villain musical show in front of the castle, villain meet and greets, amazing park decorations and, best of all, a special parade opened with the Headless Horseman on horseback. It’s all totally Disney and so out of their normal festivities that it’s worth putting off your vacation until that time of year.
• Knott's presents Knott's Scary Farm. Save significantly on your tickets by buying them online instead of at the gate.
• Universal puts on Halloween Horror Nights. While ticket prices don't waver, you're sure to get your money's worth while riding select rides and being scared out of your wits with roaming creeps, themed haunted houses and scare zones. It's like being in your very own horror movie. 
• Busch Gardens in Tampa offers up Howl-o-Scream. Much like Universal, they have scare zones, haunted houses and themed entertainment. You can't get cheaper tickets for this event either, but it'll scare your pants off, which you maybe can't put a price on.
• Sea World has a great event for the little ones and admission is included with your regular park ticket. It's called Spooktacular and it offers trick-or-treating, silly and spooky shows and kids are encouraged to come in costumes.

What are some of your favorite ways to celebrate fall? In the next blog post I'll talk about awesome and easily packable Halloween costumes for your travels.

Win an iPad Mini + 12 Months of F-Secure Key

Last week I wrote about a great service that keeps track of all your passwords with one master password. One password to rule them all! If you missed it, read about it here. Now through next Tuesday at midnight (PST) I'm going to be running a promo. Leave a comment on my Facebook post about F-Secure, share my post with your Twitter followers or leave a blog post comment and you could win a 16GB iPad Mini and 12 months of F-Secure Key. Sounds easy, right? Enter below! (Sorry, open to US residents of 18 years or age or older only.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

That's it. On Wednesday I'll check everyone's posts and contact the winner by Thursday, Oct 2nd for their shipping info to send to F-Secure to get a new Mini to them. Good luck!