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 […]

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 […]

You are standing at a register in a country you have dreamed about for years, holding out a fistful of unfamiliar bills like a child playing a game she never learned the rules to. You are hoping the cashier picks the right ones instead of you guessing wrong in front of a line of people […]

You can spend eleven months planning a family trip and still lie awake the night before, wondering if you have made a mistake. That is the strange, wonderful truth of all trips, including a Galapagos family vacation. A Galapagos trip is one of the most researched trips a parent will ever book. And it is […]

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 […]