Although you're three hours from the seaside, there are plenty of child-friendly lake and riverside beaches within a short drive.
Stone paths also run down to little riverside beaches; waterfalls with swimmable rock pools are plentiful in the area.
Riversides, beaches, and meadows all make good picnic locations.
nytimes.com/frugaltraveler GLOBESPOTTERS Correspondents report on summer pop-up restaurants in Rome, a riverside urban beach in Paris and a new English-language book store in Berlin (above).
The area brims with attractions — a curious artificial beach, riverside parks, a spinning Ferris wheel — but most notable is the culture-rich complex that houses a pair of the city's finest art venues: the Queensland Art Gallery, or QAG, and the Gallery of Modern Art, or GoMA (Stanley Place; qagoma.qld.gov.au).
These included closing the Seine riverbank roadway for part of the summer (and transforming the riverside into a series of beaches, known as the Paris Plages), adding new bus lanes on main boulevards, and establishing studies on the reintroduction of trams and more use of the Seine to carry cargo.
Tourists flock to Hoi An, with its ancient riverside houses, cooking schools and nearby beach.
In June 2003, the Parks Department sought bidders willing to design, build, operate and maintain Wi-Fi networks in all or part of Battery, Central, Flushing Meadows-Corona, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, Van Cortlandt and Washington Square Parks, as well as Orchard Beach in the Bronx.
The village of Siolim is often overlooked by travellers, due to its riverside location some way from the nearest beach.
And near the village of Bettyhill – home to the Strathnaver Museum, all about the ancient Mackay clan – there's a lovely beach at Torrisdale Bay – again with dunes, riverside and moorland, and the occasional wandering cow.
Just outside the National, a grey clinker-built boat has been beached: constructed from recycled scenery and riverside salvage, it's about 17 metres long and has a 10 metre-high mast.
