Your eight-year-old will not stop asking if a ghost is real, and you are going to love that you cannot give her a straight answer. That is the whole draw of haunted towns in the south. History here does not sit quietly behind velvet ropes. It leans over your shoulder on a dark street. It […]

Your daughter has her nose pressed to the cabin window before her shoes are even on, watching a medieval town square drift past like something out of a snow globe. Plus, you unpacked your suitcase and are happy you won’t need to do it again during your trip. That is the first morning of a […]

Most people assume the desert closes for the season the moment the temperature drops. That assumption is exactly why the smartest travelers have the whole region to themselves every winter. A southwest winter vacation is not a consolation prize for missing summer. It might be the best version of this landscape you will ever see […]

Nobody warns you that the hardest part of planning a Napa Valley family vacation isn’t the itinerary. It’s convincing yourself that you’re allowed to bring the kids. I have stood in that exact hesitation, scrolling through photo after photo of couples clinking glasses on a terrace, wondering if a place this polished has any room […]

Here’s the question every parent asks me before they’ve even booked the flights: Can one island really work for a toddler who naps at noon and a teenager who wants a real adventure story to bring home? After planning enough Kauai trips to lose count, I can tell you the answer is yes, but only […]

Somebody is going to cry before you cross the Oregon border, and it probably will not be the kids. That is the truth nobody tells you about a family getaway on this coast of the United States. The tears usually belong to the parent who packed too much into one day and forgot to breathe. […]

The inn with the fireplace suite, the one that sits above a frozen river in Vermont with nothing but white pines and silence outside the window, was fully booked by October. Not December. October. The woman who finally decided in November that she deserved a real winter trip found the same thing everywhere she looked: […]

You have been picturing the wrong place to see polar bears this whole time and so has nearly everyone else. The best places to see polar bears are not at the North Pole at all. The best places are scattered across a wild, living edge of our planet. Once you know where to look, you […]

There is a moment on a northern lights Alaska family vacation when your child grabs your hand in the dark, looks up at a sky on fire with green and violet light, and you realize this is the memory they will carry for the rest of their life. No screen. No theme park. No carefully […]

The presidential museums to visit for America’s 250th anniversary are not just history lessons your children will forget by Monday morning. They are the kind of experiences that rearrange something inside a person. The kind that makes your ten-year-old go quiet in the car on the way home because she is still thinking about what […]