It’s time for Passports with Purpose 2014 and today I have the pleasure of participating in the kick-off of this year’s fund-raising activities and offering you a chance to experience the very best of Seattle.

First, let’s do a little review of Passports with Purpose. This will be the seventh year that I’ve worked on this online fund-raiser as co-founder and board member. In previous years we’ve built a school in Cambodia, a village in India, libraries in Zambia, water wells in Haiti and in 2013, two schools in Mali.

This year we’re trying something a little different: our blogger supporters voted on a shortlist of charities and selected Sustainable Harvest International as our 2014 beneficiary. Every $5k raised will help one extended family in Honduras learn to farm sustainably for five years with lasting benefits for them and their community.

My prize this year is a overnight stay at the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle. You can donate $10 and enter to win this prize on the Passports with Purpose Prize Catalog page. Your donation goes directly to the beneficiary charity, and you get the chance to win a neat prize.

The Four Seasons in Seattle is a beautiful property. It is my go-to place for a pre-dinner drinks for date night or for a glass of prosecco with a girlfriend after an busy day shopping. It is steps from Pike Place Market and across the street from the Seattle Art Museum. The elegant, calming, tasteful decor includes some original art works from the Pacific Northwest School – artists of the last century who came to the region and were inspired by its landscape, native crafts and burgeoning art scene. This art-inspired theme is carried through in the Art Lounge and Art Restaurant which provide sumptuous dining experiences.

Prize Details
Want to experience the best of Seattle? Do so from your home-away-from-home with a one-night stay at Four Seasons Hotel Seattle and then relax with a 50-minute Swedish massage at The Spa at Four Seasons Hotel Seattle. This Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star hotel is located in downtown Seattle, just a block away from Seattle Art Museum, Pike Place Market, the Seattle Great Wheel and more. Take advantage of the hotel’s heated, outdoor infinity pool, and enjoy its resort-within-the-city vibe.

Blackout dates apply. Hotel and spa must be booked together. Expires December 31, 2015.

How to Donate (and enter the free sweepstakes drawing for this prize)
Just as in previous years, Passports with Purpose 2014 will operate as an online free drawing. This great prize is listed on the donation page. For each $10 donation that you make, you get a chance to enter a free drawing for this or any of the other prizes listed. It’s that simple. Go, check out the prizes, donate $10, $20, $50 or $100 and on December 17th 2014 we’ll announce the winner of each prize.

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We turned up at Fort Clinton at a sprightly (for us) 11am, our pre-purchased CityPass tickets for the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island ferry in hand. And then we stopped. And stared. Holy cow! Where did all of these people come from? Just nearby and all over the world apparently judging by the accents. We turned tail (and made plans to come back again much, much earlier on another day).

The good part about having over-traveled children is that they just rolled with the Ellis Island change-of-plans. We hopped on a subway uptown with revised plans for the day.

For me, travel is about visiting new places, seeing new things, basically re-gaining joy and wonder – things that the daily work-school-housework will grind into oblivion. Joy and wonder, however, are exhaustingly difficult to elicit from my over-traveled children which is why I will treasure the looks on their faces when we walked into Times Square for a long time. The unexpected April sunshine made everything sparkle, and the crowds weren’t too bad (obviously everyone was standing around Battery Park instead!!). Times Square worked its’ magic on my teenage boys and I couldn’t stop grinning.

We touristed at the Rockefeller Center where my ultra-geek challenged himself to name all the flags (achievement unlocked). Bet you didn’t know that the flags of both North Korea and Somalia are flown outside this center of American capitalism!

We ended our sightseeing day with a quick stop “for a drink at the Rooftop cafe” in the Metropolitan Museum leading B to challenge “I see what you’re doing here, squeezing in culture and thinking we won’t notice!”. “What? Who? Me? Never!”

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