Hi Chaunncy,

I am not familiar with Tauck Bridges, is this a US or UK based company? We booked Galapagos with a different company back in November 2012 and traveled to Galapagos just recently in early January 2013 with our 11 year old.

Our 11 year had a BLAST. It was fantastic to see her really "getting into it" with her binoculars and simple point and shoot camera. We required her to journal in the evenings because she missed a couple of school days to do the trip. This was actually a superb activity and helped her to fully process her experience, look at the maps more and use the wildlife books to look up what we had seen. Age-wise she was perfect so I think that your 10 year old will be quite appropriate. One note: my daughter has a LOT of food allergies and this was sometimes challenging in Ecuador. Every place we went they were very willing to help but sometimes I don't think they got it quite right because she had several allergy issues during the trip. We are new to travelling with a kid who seems, in the past year to have developed all these allergies.

We went with an outfit called Untamed Path and they were top notch. Both from the aspect of advance planning and from the aspect of support while we were travelling. Greg and I are experienced travelers and like to use a tour agency to set up a portion of the trip for us and do a portion of it ourselves (day trips etc). Untamed Path was happy to do things however we wanted. They are extremely detail oriented and replied to my communications quickly. We got the feeling that our travel planner (Jen) knew a tremendous amount about the places we were visiting and was very invested in us having a successful trip. The only complaint we had was that they did not book international flights for us. It would have been nice to just turn that over completely to someone else. They did however help me research flights to determine the best option for our dates which did save me a bunch of time (and money). They did not charge us for this assistance like my last travel agent.

One place that I was VERY glad that we went with our daughter during a day in Quito was the Inti Nana museum. Very educational. I read someplace that some of the equator experiments at this museum are rigged but who cares. Our daughter learned tons and was very engaged.

Hope this post is helpful for you. I don't normally post but I did get a lot of info from Fodor's forum for planning my last couple of trips for the family so wanted to offer the same to someone else!

Have fun!!!!

Dianne