Public family restrooms, sometimes called Unisex restrooms, are becoming more popular as buildings are renovated to keep up with the changing needs of society.

These flexible rooms accommodate two adults comfortably, are big enough for a wheelchair, come with changing tables and afford more privacy than single-gender restrooms.

They solve the dilemma of which bathroom one gender is supposed to use while assisting the other gender, letting a grandfather, for example, assist his young granddaughter without having to narrow their choices to the men’s or women’s bathrooms.

Learn more from The American Restroom.org and watch for one in your airport, train station and department store.

Marty needed a Mobigrip on a recent flight when her iPod slipped off her lap and under the seat in front of her.

The iPod then slid so far forward she couldn’t retrieve it until the plane landed and she could get down on her hands and knees in the aisle and hunt for it. Not a fun time. Not a pretty picture.

The Mobigrip is a peel-and-stick gizmo that attaches to the underside of a cell phone, iPod, glucose meter, television remote and so on. The Mobigrip’s band slips over your finger, making it more difficult for the object to fall. Useful for people who have limited hand strength or are just plain klutzy, like Marty.

The Mobigrip people have this cute video on their Web site, where you can see the various Mobigrip colors.

The Wordlock lets you set a combination using a word rather than a set of code numbers for locks for your luggage, locker, shed, yard gate, etc.

Its maker calls Wordlock the next generation of friendly, easy to use security devices for everyday life with thousands of possible combinations.

We’re not saying the Wordlock is going to improve our memory, but it’s got to be less confusing to remember a familiar word rather than a set of code numbers - at least for us!

We wouldn’t recommend Wordlock for a bank vault, but they’re sturdy for myriad other uses such as your travel luggage or the locker at your water aerobics class.

Eds. Note: Marty has two locks with numbers she hasn’t been able to open for more than a year. Periodically she retrieves them from her May-Be-Useful-Someday-But-Junk-Right-Now Drawer and plays with them hoping the code numbers will magically pop back into her brain. Fat chance.

In a great spirit of adventure, a pack of students, some sighted, some blind, take on the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.

Click here for a CBS video of their wild ride!

Check out Scott Rains’ posts on accessible taxicabs getting priority when being dispatched at New York’s JFK Airport. It’s a new program to encourage cab drivers to provide service to people with disabilities.

From Down Under, Scott posts about RollAwayz — a Google Earth tool for locating wheelchair accessible accommodations throughout Australia.

Find them here at Scot’s blog Rolling Rains.

The M-V Argyl has yet to be snatched up for the 2008 holidays for a getaway in the British Virgin Islands - her winter home.

This baby is fully accessible on every deck and down every hallway. There’s even a wheelchair-accessible swimming platform.

Scott Rains, who uses a wheelchair and writes the travel blog Rolling Rains, says he likes to share big dreams. So if the Gimpy Girls round up with Scott, we only need seven more people for a romp aboard the Argyl, which has five staterooms that sleep 10.

The Argyl, from Waypoint Yacht Charter Services, has a two-week booking minimum so if we each chip in $30,000 we’re there. Last one in the Jacuzzi picks up the caviar tab!

Eds Note: After sleeping on it, we see we can’t charter the Argyl this year. We try to budget for our vacations and $90,000 (for Marty, Cait and her husband, Doug) is a bit of stretch for us this year. Sorry Scott.

Cait has promised, however, to make a match-stick replica of the Argyl for her coffee table, which will keep the Argyl in the forefront of our budget planning for 2009.

With so many of you heading out for the Olympics and the Paralympics this summer we thought we’d help you with packing, healing and knowing how to ask for toilet paper if you don’t speak Chinese.

The following three little books cover a lot of ground, even if you’re only going to Sheboygan, as Cait regularly does to ‘take the waters.’

Point It: Traveller’s Language Kit lets the photos do the talking if you are not fluent in the native language. It’s 1200 images can help you find everything from, yes, the toilet paper to mosquito spray and a shoeshine.

The Pocket Doctor: A Passport to Healthy Travel arms the traveler with essential information to prepare for a trip, to stay healthy along the journey, and to initiate care if health problems arise en route.

The Packing Book: Secrets of the Carry-On Traveler shows you it is possible to pack everything you need into a single carry-on bag - all that’s required is planning.

Entertainment needs and even security tips are included in this guide to getting the most out of the least amount of luggage. Even seasoned travelers may be surprised at how much they never knew about packing light.

The next time you travel to a theme park ask if they have portable Global Positioning Systems - palm-sized electronic guides that help you navigate and save steps.

SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, for example, has Shamu’s SmartGuide which tells you - by voice in English, Spanish or Portuguese - of the nearest rest room, which restaurant has air conditioning, points of interest and how to get to the best view of the fireworks.

Some of the information is available on the park’s traditional paper map. What the GPS does is reorganize that information. For example, the entertainment lineup can be filtered by show name or by time of day. Rides can be divided into “thrill” or kid-friendly, family ride listings.

(via The Orlando Sentinel)

We wish we had created “Gimp on the Go” but Adam Lloyd, a wheelchair-user, beat us to it and did a great job. Lloyd created his much-needed travel site after he was injured in a diving accident.

His site says he hasn’t been able to devote as much time to it as he would like because he’s working on a Ph.D. in English.

The site says he continues to answer travel questions from time to time and fans of the site may post stories, reviews and photos, but it’s difficult to tell how current the material is. If any of you know more about the status of this site, please let us know.

Click here to listen to Lloyd when he was interviewed on The Savvy Traveler, a wonderful - and now defunct - public radio show that used to broadcast from Minnesota. You can still access the Savvy Traveler’s archives.

Go to outdoor sporting events and you will see Sigg bottles attached to many.

Invented in Switzerland in 1908, the extraordinarily light Sigg was rated by Backpacker magazine as the world’s toughest water bottle and it is so classic looking that it’s in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Made of aluminum, it imparts no taste or scent to water or even acidic juices. The Sigg Web site offers 144 designs by more than 30 independent artists and the bodies and lids are interchangeable and can hook to your belt, chair, backpack or bike. (Or in Cait’s case, her adult tricycle.)

Sigg claims that many of its bottles in Europe are still being used 10-20 years after purchase. If that’s true, and the idea catches on in North America, it could help reduce the number of plastic bottles now filling our waste dumps.

Eds. Note: Aluminum requires a lot of energy to manufacture so we’re not so sure Sigg is as Green as it portrays itself to be on its Web site. But, in our opinion, it surely must be Greener to own one aluminum bottle and use it for years rather than routinely buying and tossing plastic bottles.