This a bit off topic. But it is related to the Total War series though so stick with me for a moment. (Moderators I tried to post this to the History section of the site first but it said I don't have permission. Do you have to be a senior member to post there?)

This April my wife, son and I are going on a holiday to Italy and Egypt. My son finds out about the trip on Saturday (he knows we're going on a holiday but not where). I know hes going to have a great time, but I want to get him really psyched up for the history aspect of the trip, because I'm a history buff and we're going to spend alot of time looking at old ruins and stuff.

What I want to do is make a day by day itinerary of where we will be going and what we will be seeing, little facts about the time period etc. I don't want it to look too much like heavy reading or he will lose interest in it. He has just turned 15, has read the Harry Potter books, and a couple of Dan Brown books so its not like he can't read, but hes not heavily into reading, he won't read dry non-fiction material.

The guide is going to have lots of pictures and stuff. I already know that its going to have a theme based on computer games. Some of his favourite games are Civ 4, Rome: Total War and Medieval: Total War. So I am going to include relevant screenshots from those games in the guide. That will get him interested in reading the whole thing. Plus he can follow it day by day while we are travelling to see whats coming up.

Anyway any ideas you have would be appreciated. Any recourses I can get hold of that are easy to download and raid for material that I can then put in the guide and print out on a colour printer. Anything that would make the guide cooler or less work to put together.

I want to make it relevant to him not just a boring history book. The computer game screenshots will hopefully go a long way. But any other ideas would be good. He likes "Top Ten" lists and stuff like that. Otherwise he likes alot of the same stuff other teenage boys like. Movies (Lord of the Rings) TV (Lost and that post nuclear war series) sport, and like I said computer games.

I've started looking through the history recourses stickied at the top of the Monastery forum (timelines, cool he will like that) but its a very long list so I'm not going to able to trawl through it in detail by Saturday. So if anyone can point me to specific cool things that would be good to. Not detailed historical accounts but bite sized compelling bits of info.

Tony