New ‘Wanderlust and Lipstick’ guide gives the wisdom on traveling with wee ones.

The time for travel is upon us.

Maybe it’s because the kids are out of school. Maybe it’s the most practical time to hit the road. Or perhaps the longer, sun-soaked days simply inspire more time away from the 9-to-5.

“No matter the reason,” Beth Whitman, author, travel writer and editor of the “Wanderlust and Lipstick” online travel resource for women, writes in her June 1 blog, “summer is when most people decide to get outta town,”

She goes on to list pros and cons for summertime plans ranging from the “summer vacation,” to the “stay-cation,” to the “nay-cation.”

While in the current economy, many may be opting for one of the latter, less-expensive type of “cation,” a new book from the Wanderlust and Lipstick line emphasizes the importance of, and the trick to, “Traveling with Kids” — by co-authors Leslie Forsberg and Wandermom Michelle Duffy, with a foreword from Whitman.

Forsberg, a freelance writer and former editor of Alaska Airlines Magazine, came to Bainbridge to talk about the book and her travels June 4.

“I think that it’s really important for people to travel as young as they can,” she said. “It will help form your impressions about the world in general and help you to be a much more well-rounded person. The younger you can start, the better.”

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Forsberg said she got the proverbial “bug” when she was growing up on the family farm in Port Angeles. “The whole world seemed fascinating just beyond the farm gates,” she said. That fascination led her to becoming an exchange student, spending time with a family in Mexico during her high school years, and, later, to backpacking across Europe solo.

Even as she settled down years later and started a family with the birth of her daughter, the adventurous spirit didn’t subside.

“I always took her along,” Forsberg said. “We started when she was a baby, we’d go on day trips everywhere, all around Puget Sound.”

As her daughter got older, the trips got longer, and now, Forsberg and family travel regularly around the world — to Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii and Europe — with the pros almost always outweighing the cons.

“It’s really not about the distance traveled,” she writes in the Wanderlust and Lipstick guide to Traveling with Kids. “It’s about those little moments when your child makes a connection she wouldn’t have without the firsthand experience.”

The book is filled with that sentiment through the stories, among others, of a mom who spent two months in India with her sons, to another who climbed the mountains of Switzerland with her daughter, and one who traveled to Nepal with her son.

“Equally important,” Whitman writes in the foreword, “are the women (and often their spouses) who’ve taken their children to camp in the great outdoors, to the theme park or to visit family in neighboring states.”

For more on the book, and all things traveling women, go to www.wanderlustandlipstick.com