Why Are We Doing This?

We were somewhere in the middle of Indiana driving on Interstate 64 when my wife and I got a whiff of something emanating from the back of the car. We were returning from a funeral in Missouri to our home in Louisville, Kentucky, with our 18-month-old son in the back seat. The signature smell could mean one thing only – our son had done a number two in his diaper. We were only about 15 minutes from home, at the end of a 4-hour trip, and assumed we could tolerate the smell a little longer to avoid an extra stop. We were so close, but when I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I was horrified. The little guy had reached into his diaper, and his hands were caked in poop! He was opening and closing his fists in seemingly complete awe that his body produced such a fun play thing.  He had wiped poop on his clothes, his car seat, the car windows, and anything else his 18-month-old arms could reach. Plans immediately changed and we were glad for a nearby exit. On that day (after using 90+ diaper wipes), I understood that traveling with children is complicated!

Yes, traveling with children is difficult, but the rewards are great.

Our two children have been traveling by car, plane, and cruise ship practically since birth. Our son was two-months-old when we took a car trip from Louisville, Kentucky to Hot Springs, Arkansas for a Thanksgiving reunion. And our daughter was six-weeks-old when we boarded a plane for a cross-country trip to meet her grandparents. Our kids have frequent flyer numbers and frequent cruise memberships. They have visited U.S. states from coast to coast and countries and islands around the Caribbean.

With all of this family travel, we have learned many valuable lessons and tricks to make it manageable, affordable, and most of all, enjoyable! That is what this blog is about. We want to share our experiences, lessons learned, and tips for enjoyable family travel with you.  We’ll talk about favorite places we’ve been and adventures we’ve taken. We’ll also talk about our worst experiences and how you can avoid the mistakes we made.

When we first married, my wife and I decided that we wanted to make travel a priority. Rather than collecting things, we are collecting  experiences and seeing the world. Our children, without knowing it, signed up for a childhood filled with travel and adventure. They haven’t complained too much about the decision my wife and I made all those years ago and actually look forward to planning a new vacation and seeing a new place. The whole family likes planning new vacations, revisiting favorite places and re-living favorite memories.

We want to encourage you and your family to travel more, experience more and enjoy the journey more by being a resource for you in your adventures.

So grab your free ticket, take your seat, and prepare for a fabulous journey.

A Look Back and A Look Forward (Update July 2023)

Our blog becomes six years old this month. That means it’s time to take a look back and also look forward.

When I started this blog six years ago, the goals that you read above were truly my intended goals. Through the years those objectives have changed some.

First, and foremost, as our children have become teenagers, our traveling focus has changed too. The things our kids like to do have shifted as well.

Additionally, life has changed for us in many ways. Of course, the most obvious change came with the COVID pandemic, which changed everyone’s plans for a couple of years. It had a great impact on us. We were unable to travel as much. But, we also moved from Colorado to Hawaii in the early days of the pandemic to start a new business.

The move was tough on us. It was further complicated with the location change. We moved to a quiet island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at a time when travel become very restricted. As a result, we needed to focus fully on our business in order to survive with no visitors to the island. And that meant that our focus shifted away from traveling and the blog.

But, I always wanted to return to the blog. After a three-year hiatus, we have relaunched this site.

Ultimately, the blog shifted objectives. While I still want to provide tips and tricks to make travelling simple for families, I also see the blog as an outlet for me to share experiences with the world. It also offers my family a digital scrapbook. We now live far away from many family members. Yet, we can share our experiences, and our photos with our family. Honestly, I look back on the pictures and relive fantastic memories of journeys and adventures with my kids. I see how brave they have been for so long. They are willing to take risks and seek adventures that I would never have attempted at their ages (and quite likely I still hesitate to take those risks at my age).

The focus of the bog has also shifted in terms of scope. I used to think that I must write comprehensive guides to towns, national parks, or states. Now, partially due to time restraints in this season of my life, I anticipate blog posts on a smaller scale (a hiking trail, a guide to an aquarium, or a review of a luau).

I don’t know that anyone will read this update, or care about what I am writing here. But, those are my thoughts as I relaunch the site and start writing new blog posts after too lengthy a hiatus.

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Read about some of our travel mishaps in Travel Mishaps: Part 1 and Travel Mishaps: Part 2.