This is part of a series of posts on the best family travel apps. See other posts in this series on the Best Hotel and Flight Booking Apps and Tools and Apps for Road Trips.

If the romance of road trips hasn't worn off even though you've got kids in the back seat, I get it. The idea of just jumping in the car and driving to see what types of adventures await is definitely appealing, and with a little planning and the right tools road trips can be great family vacations with kids of all ages.

There's no question that the smart phone and tablets have revolutionized long car drives for families if only because their unlimited access to games and videos can keep the backseaters quiet almost indefinitely. But there's a lot more that your digital devices could be doing to make your road trip vacation better in ways that will get everyone in the family engaged in the adventure rather than in their screens.

Here are the best apps for making your family road trip vacation better:

Kidville, Brentwood's new indoor playspace, wants one lucky Mommy Poppins reader to win four free tickets to see the hit musical Mary Poppins at the Ahmanson! The Broadway show comes back to LA in August for a four week run, and Kidville figures that if anyone deserves a night out with Mary Poppins, it's Mommy Poppins. Read on for details of the give-away and a special Mary Poppins celebration at Kidville.

The current heatwave is supposed to break by Friday and that's good news considering all of the fantastic outdoor events coming up this weekend. Get into the Olympic spirit right here in NYC at Aviator Sports' Olympic Sports Festival or get artsy at the annual New Museum Block Party on the Lower East Side. Meanwhile over in Coney Island you can show off your sand castle skills at the annual Sand Sculpting Contest or head to Crown Heights for the neighborhood's annual Children’s Day.

If you just can't survive without air-conditioning, there's lots of indoor fun too like an afternoon of rare Muppet videos in Williamsburg, Dragon Boat Family Day at the New York Hall of Science or an open art studio for families at the Whitney.

Our best bets for the weekend are below. You can find additional options in our Event Calendar and our Summer Fun Guide, including our brand-new list of 50 ways to cool with kids in NYC. Looks like it will come in handy this season.

It's been a scorcher this week, but you can stay cool with a fun-filled family weekend of fairs, fairies and felines here in New Jersey. There's the Passaic County Fair in Woodland Park, the (yum!) State Ice Cream Festival in Toms River, the Cat Expo in Somerset, an Open House at the Watchung Stables and a Fairy Festival in Pennington to keep your crew entertained. Read on for all our top picks and remember, you can find a listing of all NJ activities for kids in our Event Calendar.

If your family enjoys music, dance or art, there are so many great events to choose from this weekend. Dance lovers will enjoy a free performance by the Connecticut Ballet Dance Caravan at the WCSU campus on Friday night.  Your budding performer will not only watch the performance but will have an opportunity to dance with the ballet troupe following the show.

Captain Kidd hid his treasure somewhere around Gardiners Bay, and modern-day treasures are still being hidden all across Long Island and indeed all around the world. Welcome to the game of geocaching, a modern-day treasure hunt where players hide and seek cached containers using GPS-enabled devices like smartphones or GPS navigators. There are almost certainly caches hidden in your neighborhood, probably more than one! And if your children are Scouts, they can even win a merit badge for hunting them.

For this edition of my series of special needs posts, I'm taking a look at sports programs for children with special needs. As the mother of a son with autism, I am consistently amazed by the ingenuity of parents, teachers, therapists and sports enthusiasts who manage to adapt traditional athletic activities to accommodate kids like him.

I've seen firsthand how hard it can be for kids with special needs to engage in sports. For my 10-year-old son Jake, sports present unique challenges. Like many kids on the autism spectrum, he requires one-on-one support to remain on task and to manage frustration. The programs below are some of our favorites, and I've added a few we're looking forward to trying. While some of the organizations offer drop-in or one-off sessions, keep in mind that advance registration is often required.

If there's one city in the world that deserves more Shakespeare in the park than any other, surely it's ours. Oh, yes, London may be Shakespeare's 'hood, and New York has that awfully famous park, but we've got something infinitely more important: the weather. No need to suffer for our art here; when Angelenos see theater al fresco on a summer evening it is a pure delight - it is, in fact, As You Like It.