It can be scary taking your under-two-year-old baby on a trip. A day at home can easily fall to pieces with a missed nap, cranky feeding, or weird mood. Who knows what the road will hold? More importantly, you might wonder if you can handle the stressors of baby + travel without throwing yourself on...

How long has it been since you settled into a train seat for a relaxing ride? Or caught a plane for a weekend getaway? Instead your days have been spent teaching your baby how to sleep or wiping spit-up. But once you hit the two-month-old mark, your baby's big eyes are gulping in the world....

At the end of last year, I had the honor of showing my mother, Europe for the first time. More importantly than her first time in Europe, it was her first time venturing out of the country. When my mother made plans to visit me in Italy, I envisioned my role as a tour guide....

The road is beckoning. Your wanderlust has woken from its brief nap during pregnancy. Now you want to smell the planes' exhaust permanently lingering in the airport, wake in an unfamiliar bed in an unknown city and venture to find breakfast. You need to travel. Only this time a new partner in crime will accompany...

Let's dispel one myth right away: that you can't travel with your baby. When I announced my pregnancy, the second thing people said after "congratulations" was, "better get all your traveling out of the way now. Once your baby comes, you won't be able to go on so many trips." That's a viewpoint based entirely...

"It was time for something different," says Jacqui Rickard. "Our kids are getting older so it was a good time." Thus began their adventure. Jacqui and her husband, James Rickard, hit the road with their six children (ranging in age from two to 12 years old) to spend four weeks biking Tasmania and Australia. That...

I've been on a journey these last nine months. Yet I don't have a tally of how many miles I've traveled, countries visited, or new foods eaten. My journey has taken a different path. Where at journey's end, I'll emerge member of a special group of travelers: those who have gone before and now dispense...

When families first announce their plans for extended travel, many of them are hit with repeated questions about their child’s education. Too often, the parents of traveling kids are seen as selfish. Adults feeding their own desires at the expense of their child’s education and “normal” school experience. The reality is that most traveling parents...

Families traveling the world with their children get asked a whole lot of questions. Topping the list are questions about their children’s education. It seems everyone wants to know what these traveling kids are learning, how, and with whom. And these questions don’t really stop as the kids get older. Ask any young adult taking...

How young is too young to travel? It’s a question that comes up whenever the subject of family travel arises. Some worry about the risk of illness for infants on the road. Others have fears that their child will reject every food option that isn’t chicken fingers and starve. Concerns about water, weather, and boredom...

Traveling slowly with my husband across Southeast Asia has been a great way to leave our jobs and lives in Canada behind to explore the world on a small budget. It also means we spend a lot of time together. Every meal, every walk, every bus ride to a new city, is together. Where once...

We are asked, on occasion, what we “do” about the social needs of our children. Granted, the question has never been asked by anyone who’s actually met our children. Spend an hour interacting with them and you’ll know a few things: They love to talk. YOU are their socialization of the moment. They have friends...

My dad returning to Yosemite Valley, a place he knew well as a teenager in the 60's. While not everyone grew up in a traditional family structure, this article can apply to anyone who has a loving relationship with a family member who was part of your upbringing. For me, that was my parents, but...

Over the course of my traveling years, I have made a fair number of trips with children, teens, and young people. I am a huge advocate for the benefits of travel on developing minds and souls. Many people recognize the benefits of getting outside of the comfortable bubble of Western adolescence and digging into new...

Travel is ruining my kids. And me, for that matter. It’s true. All of our well meaning efforts for a broad education, liberal experiences in the “real world,” and our sincere efforts to raise kids who are cultured, multi-lingual and have some perspective on the diversity of the history, geography and human family of the...

We’re sneaking up on our fifth anniversary of full time travel with our kids. When we left on our bicycle trip around Europe and N. Africa they were five through eleven years old. They are now ten through sixteen, and as comfortable in the livestock market in Tona Toroja as they are in a department...

Cost/day: $2 for adults, $1 for children What’s the most exciting thing that's happened lately? We recently had our sixth child, at home, here in Costa Rica. Today was our first outing since she's been born. We went with grandma and grandpa to the Children's Museum (Museo de los Ninos) in San Jose. Describe a...

We spend a lot of time waiting on things: Planes, trains, buses and more. We’ve gotten good at waiting over the years. Our secret weapon? Games. We play games while we wait. We always have. When the kids were little we played “I spy” and sang nursery rhymes and told jokes while we waited. We...

My Dad's photo of Lago de Atitlan, 1973 It seems the nature of humanity to freeze a moment in time. We remember a person, a place, an experience, as it was when we were last present with it. It is frozen, forever, in our minds; like the fading koda-chrome slides my parents took across the...

Five months of extended, slow travel taught me valuable life lessons that I never could have learned from a one week vacation or a weekend getaway. Once I got past the initial lure of traveling to new places (including Guatemala, Taiwan, Australia, and Ethiopia), seeing new things, and doing different activities, the time spent traveling...