Somewhere between booking her mother’s plane ticket and typing “can a nine year old handle a five hour car ride” into Google at eleven at night, every woman planning a multigenerational trip to Scotland hits the same wall: Will this trip work for everyone, or will someone come home exhausted instead of happy? I think […]

The temple bells were still ringing when the fog lifted off the mountainside. I remember standing there in a courtyard outside Taipei thinking that nobody back home would believe this was Taiwan. That’s the part nobody tells you. Some of the best things to do in Taiwan never make it onto a postcard. This island […]

Somewhere between the fortieth open browser tab and the group text where nobody can agree on a single island, most family trip planning quietly falls apart. You are trying to make everyone happy: The toddler who needs a nap by two o’clock. The teenager who will only put her phone down for something with a […]

Every parent who types “is the French Quarter safe for kids” into a search bar at midnight is really asking something bigger: Can this trip be wild enough to feel like a real adventure and still safe enough that she can relax. After twenty years of building family vacation in New Orleans itineraries that families […]

A grandmother is barefoot on the bow of a small wooden boat. Her sunglasses pushed into gray hair, laughing at something her nine-year-old grandson just said. All while her daughter and son-in-law sit two feet away doing nothing but watching the coastline slide by. Nobody is checking their phone. Nobody is negotiating what happens next. […]

Forty-five minutes. That is how long our tour guide gave us to stand in the middle of the most beautiful Christmas market square I had ever seen. I had a glass of hot gluhwein warming one hand and my father in law’s arm resting on the other. Despite what the guide thought was a long […]

Every guidebook you have skimmed has hinted, gently or not so gently, that the Galapagos is not really built for children. Yet, every one of them is wrong. Galapagos with kids is not a compromise trip. It might be the best one your family ever takes. I once watched a six-year-old freeze mid step, grinning […]

At two in the morning in Lisbon, ten in the evening my time, my phone lit up with an alert that a client’s connecting flight had just vanished from the system. She was still asleep. By the time she opened her eyes, a new flight, a new driver, and a full explanation were already waiting […]

The question always arrives the same way, usually a few minutes into our very first phone call. A mom lowers her voice like she is about to confess something and asks me, what are the best hikes on the Big Island of Hawaii. After all, she already knows her family cannot survive a whole week […]

You have just unpacked your last suitcase from your summer vacation and someone in your family has already asked when you are going back to Cape Cod. I hear this every year, usually before the last load of beach laundry is even done. That question is exactly why I never wait until spring to start […]