At the Boulders Resort and Golden Door Spa just outside of Scottsdale, AZ, you could begin Thanksgiving this year with a breakfast horseback ride, continue with mid-morning tennis instruction before settling in for a traditional Thanksgiving meal with prix fixe menus at resort restaurants The Latilla and The Palo Verde. On Friday, the festivities continue with a tennis doubles round-robin in the morning, midday children’s arts and crafts and an afternoon walk with the resort’s resident geologist to uncover the history of the rocks surrounding the property. Or you could just say screw it and go to the Golden Door Spa. You certainly won’t have a problem being thankful there.

When we checked today, you could still book a casita room for $319/night. These are the most basic rooms at the resort, but still offer wood-burning fireplaces, oversized tubs, private patios, robes and slippers, Egyptian cotton sheets and separate sleeping and sitting areas.

About three hours’ drive from Minneapolis and two hours from Fargo, there’s a Thanksgiving special that’s ideal for a family with younger kids looking for something do spice up the holiday week without breaking the bank. The Thanksgiving Special at the Arrowwood Resort & Conference Center in Alexandria, MN includes four passes to the resort’s Big Splash Water Park (pictured), a 38,000-square-foot indoor playground complete with three four-story waterslides, a Lazy River and spouting geysers. In addition to park admission, the resort is offering family activities like crafts, face painting and a special campfire and marshmallow roast throughout the week. And of course, a traditional Thanksgiving meal can be had during your visit. A midday meal will be served in the resort’s Lake Cafe (so named for its views of Lake Darling). On the menu? Everything from the requisite turkey and dressing to Swedish meatballs and a make your own waffle station.

When we checked, available rates included a standard room with two queen beds for $99 on Thanksgiving and $129 on Friday and Saturday nights.

Tuck into the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills this week, and you can save 20 percent off your room rate just for spending Thanksgiving ensconced in hotel’s oh-so-cool mid-century modern aesthetic - designed by none other than Kelly Wearstler of Bravo’s show Top Design. From the hourglass-shaped pool set in a motel-chic patio to rooms with custom-designed furnishings with vintage appeal, the 84-room hotel is a great choice for Southern California travelers who not only want a roof over their head, but a stylish one at that. Dine at the hotel’s award-winning blue on blue restaurant on Thanksgiving, and you’ll have but one difficult decision to make: whether to stay traditional with the roasted turkey with brioche stuffing or nosh on unconventional Thanksgiving offerings like New Zealand king salmon with garnet yams and huckleberries.

When we last checked rates on Sunday afternoon, a premium king room was available over Thanksgiving for $231/night (rates usually start at $289/night for premium rooms). The special rates are good for stays through Nov. 26th.

Today, we’re rounding out our look at Thanksgiving hotel packages and specials with a few fab specials we’ve found at U.S. hotels. There’s still time to throw together a last minute Turkey Day getaway - a great option for couples or small families who aren’t doing the big family gathering thing this year. We’re going to feature four options throughout the day. Be sure to check out the deals we covered last week:

So Thankful at the Alden Houston

Thanksgiving at the Inverness Hotel & Conference Center

For a last minute Thanksgiving getaway near Houston, we hear gobbling galore coming from the Alden Houston Hotel, a 97-room boutique property in the city’s downtown legal district. The property’s So Thankful package is still available for Thanksgiving 2007 and includes overnight accommodations in a deluxe room or suite, dinner for two at the hotel’s slick restaurant 17 (pictured) anytime from 11am to 9pm and hot toddies and fresh baked cookies with evening turndown service. Rates start at $269 for a room with two double beds or one king and increase to $344 for a suite with two bathrooms, sleeper sofa and 42″ plasma TV. All rooms feature free high-speed Internet access, DVD players, minibars, pillow top mattresses and 400-thread-count Egyptian cotton linens. Through Nov. 25, additional nights are $135 for standard rooms and $210 for suites.

If you’re in New York over Thanksgiving, there’s no better way to get over your all-American food hangover than Big Onion’s Annual Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour of New York, held on Nov. 23, 2007. Sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York, the walking tour ushers attendees through the Jewish East Side, Little Italy and Chinatown for edible specialties from each neighborhoods. You’ll eat well along the way, but you’ll walk away with more than a full belly. The tour is packed with anecdotes and factual information about the diverse cultures in each ‘hood and their very different histories. Reservations are required for attending the tour, which costs $20 for adults, $12 for seniors and $10 for students.

Sounds like a plan, but you’re not in town the day after Turkey Day? No worries, mates. Private tours with “enhanced noshing” opportunities are available year-round.

Not everyone does Thanksgiving with oodles of relatives and friends - it can be hard to accomplish when you live far away from your home town and circumstances prevent you from traveling during the hectic Thanksgiving travel week. But for those that want to getaway for a night or two in celebration of Turkey Day - and leave the cooking to someone else to boot - there are great deals to be had at hotels and resorts around the country. In the coming days, I’ll be highlighting several packages that are still available for Thanksgiving escapes.

First up: The Inverness Hotel and Conference Center in Englewood, Colorado. A popular destination for corporate conferences and business travelers, the hotel may at first seem an unlikely choice for Thanksgiving supper. But consider the great rates for overnight accommodations for two and Thanksgiving dinner at the hotel restaurant Baca: $110 for a standard room and $260 per night for an executive suite. That’s not bad for an overnight stay at a 4-star property with an 18-hole golf course, spa, fitness center and multiple dining options, bars and lounges.

The hotel is about a half-hour drive from Denver - so this is a solid getaway option for folks in the area who want a quick trip to a relaxing destination at a good price.

Happy Halloween. It’s that fabulous day of the year when you can get dressed up like a freak, wear clothes far sluttier than you’d ever dare in real life and get totally smashed without remorse. Unless, of course, you’re a kid. In that case, it’s really all about the candy.

Today we check in with some of our favorite travel experts to get into the Halloween, uh, spirit. Instead of blithely regurgitating tales of haunted hotels, ghost towns and places of supposed supernatural import, Concierge.com editor-in-chief Peter Frank (that’s him in the picture) and his team at Conde Nast decided to put their heads together to create a different kind of Halloween story for the web site this year.

Says Frank, “I’ve seen my share of haunted hotels, but we wanted places that will actually creep you out a little bit, places that send chills down your spine.”

And so they have. The World’s Creepiest Places, written by Ralph Martin, follows the axiom that reality is always more frightening than fiction as it roves through 13 (yes, 13) destinations pretty much guaranteed to leave you feeling like you’re on a tour of Rod Serling’s favorite vacation spots.

At the TravelPost.com Insider, we’re constantly fascinated with how travel publications compile their round-ups and select editorial content, so we decided to check in with Frank to get some firsthand information on this seasonal feature from Concierge.com, a.k.a. the home of Conde Nast Traveler.

So why do travelers specifically seek out scary places?

“There are people out there who are just drawn to the slightly macabre…. [Places] where famous events from history happened – there’s just an inherent fascination,” Frank says.

Among the places deemed creepiest by Concierge.com are familiar tourist destinations like the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., a mysterious mansion built by the wealthy and, by all accounts, disturbed heiress to the Winchester gun fortune and known for features like fake doors and staircases with no destinations.

“Once you’ve heard the story, you go there and get this window into this woman’s mind,” Frank says.

Pause for a brief tangent: The home’s bizarre past becomes all the more intriguing if you imagine our favorite modern-day heiress, Paris Hilton, similarly plagued by voices that instructed her to build and modify the same hotel over and over again until her death. Now that would be cool. And really weird.

And with digital artist Jeremy Blake’s reported devolution into paranoia and subsequent suicide this year, the Winchester House has attained even more creepy cache by association. One of the late artist’s most famous works is entitled Winchester and involves a series of unearthly images based on the mansion’s gothic interiors.

There are other places near and dear to tourists’ hearts, like, say, the stomach-turning displays of anatomical oddities at the Philadelphia Mütter museum and Romania’s Bran Castle, once home to the legendary Vlad the Impaler (upon which the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula was based).

But many of the spots included in the list are remote destinations many travelers will never see. For example, the site of the infamous 1986 Chernobyl power plant explosion that ended the short, sweet life of Pripyat, Ukraine.

“You go there, and it’s a real ghost town. It’s deserted. And things are exactly as they were 20 years ago,” Frank recalls.

And then there is the remote Easter Island (a five+ hour flight from Chile), where heavy-browed moai sculptures are the only remains of the now-extinct Rapa Nui people who once inhabited the island. If that’s not ultra creepy, we don’t know what is. Just looking at the landscape gives us chills:

What you won’t find in this list are sites where crimes against humanity and gross human atrocities have occurred.

“We didn’t do anything that was too sensitive. We wanted to have places that were distant enough in the past,” Frank says of the few locations with devastating histories attached.

One ultra-creepy spot that didn’t make the list for that very reason?

According to Frank, “We almost did the Jonestown massacre, but we decided it was just too gruesome.”

Yup. And on top of that, in the years since the Jonestown Massacre, the nearby town of Port Kaituma, Guyana has not exactly rebounded into the next vacation hotspot. Today, in fact, it’s largely home to transient workers who come to the nearby jungles to hunt for gold.

And with that, we bid you adieu. It’s time to go put our face paint on. Be sure to check out all 13 of the World’s Creepiest Places on Concierge.com.

Strolling down Market Street in San Diego’s Gaslamp District on Saturday night around 8pm, I suddenly noticed a huge line of jumpy-looking teenagers clogging up both sides of the street. What were all these teenagers doing amid the myriad bars, restaurants and posh hotels of San Diego’s downtown? With a minor amount of investigation, I discovered the attraction that had drawn the kids out in droves: The Haunted Hotel.

Located next to Hooters (yup, we said it again), on Market at 4th Street, the Haunted Hotel is an annual fright-fest based on classic and contemporary horror flicks. Pay the $13.99 admission and tip toe down the hotel’s creepy hallways and into different rooms along the predetermined path. Each room is devoted to a different horror film.

While teens will love the gross-out props and portrayals of silver screen boogeymen and the hype and energy that comes with an outing to the Gaslamp, parents can breathe easy knowing their kids are heading into an enclosed house of horrors - not an outdoor venue where people can get lost in the dark (either accidentally or on purpose, if you know what I mean).

The Haunted Hotel is open Friday and Saturday from 6pm to 1am, Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday from 7pm to 11pm and special hours the week of Halloween.

This Saturday, the Flamingo Conference Resort and Spa in Santa Rosa, Calif., hosts the 5th Annual Rock Paper Scissors Championships presented by Sonoma County’s Roshambo Winery. It’s $20 to compete, $10 to watch and the winner takes home the $2,500 purse. If you want to enter, you must do so in advance. Remember, this is a serious competition, after all. Only expect to see lots of costumes, wigs and the like. The spectators are known for dressing up (perhaps to distract the competitors?).

Can’t make it to the event this weekend? Well then maybe you’d like to hightail it to Toronto next weekend for the 2007 World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships. Held on Oct. 13th, the event offers a first prize of $10,000 to the wilily one who can outsmart all the competitors. Tickets for the World Champs are $40 to compete, $12 to watch. While the event is held at the Steam Whistle Brewing Roundhouse, the official hotel for the championship event is the Comfort Suites City Centre in downtown Toronto.