Your mother bows her head at the airport curb, a plumeria lei settles onto her shoulders, and your eight-year-old asks the question nobody in your family can answer: “Do we get to keep it forever?” That small moment holds the whole challenge of a Hawaiʻi family vacation. You want three generations to fall in love […]

The quietest your children will be all year is the moment an elephant walks past close enough to hear it breathe. I have watched it happen on a family safari in Africa more times than I can count, and it never gets old. A seven-year-old who could not sit still through breakfast suddenly forgets to […]

Somewhere around hour six of an eleven hour flight, my client’s mother leaned across the aisle and asked the question every trip organizer dreads. Whose idea was this again? That question gets asked during nearly every family reunion abroad I have helped bring to life. Usually somewhere between booking the flights and the moment the […]

By day three of most family vacations, someone is bored, someone is exhausted, and the person who planned every minute of it is you. A family river cruise quietly solves all three problems. The most rewarding river cruises sail far beyond the castles everyone already knows. Picture a different kind of trip. Your ten-year-old counts […]

Somewhere between the rental car and the waterfall, one of your family members is going to meet a staircase they can’t climb. Maybe it’s your mother, who swore her knee was fine. Maybe it’s the stroller holding your sleeping two-year-old. The waterfalls on the Big Island of Hawaii are worth every mile of the drive, […]

There is a version of you standing on a stone terrace in Croatia right now. A glass of wine in your hand as you are watching the sun drop into the Adriatic. All without a single soul asking what’s for dinner. Empty nester travel in Croatia is built entirely around getting you to her. Not […]

The water rises, the music swells, and for the first time all week, nobody in your family is looking at a phone. Your father has one hand resting on his grandson’s shoulder. Your fifteen-year-old has forgotten to be embarrassed by any of you. And you, the one who planned every carpool, every recital, and every […]

Your daughter will hold out her palm on the lanai tonight, and it will glitter. Those tiny grains of black glass were once molten rock. They are the magic of the colored sand beaches Hawaii keeps along its shores. They are also the reason one photo on her tablet can turn into the stop she […]

The gate agent calls your row, and there is no one beside you double checking the boarding pass or laughing with you about the middle seat. There is only you, a boarding pass with your name on it, and the quiet certainty that you booked this trip for yourself, and nobody talked you out of […]

Somewhere around the fourteenth browser tab, most mothers planning a Galapagos trip hit the same wall. There are thirteen major islands, six smaller ones, and more than a hundred islets. Not one guide will tell her which island her kids should wake up on. Here is the honest answer. The best Galapagos island for families […]