Travel has always been part of our family’s story. But the shape of that travel has changed so many times over the years that looking back feels like flipping through albums from different lifetimes.
There were the early years when my husband and I could pack a single bag and leave on a whim. The chaotic toddler phase when leaving the house required military-level logistics. The school years when travel meant working around academic calendars and activity schedules. And now, with our children growing into their own people, travel has transformed yet again into something I never anticipated.
What I have learned through all these phases is that travel is never just about destinations. It is about who we are when we get there. How we show up for each other. What we allow ourselves to experience. The memories we create often have little to do with where we went and everything to do with how we were together.
This is the story of how different kinds of travel have shaped our family and what each chapter taught me about connection, presence and the places we call home along the way.
When Work Travel Complicated Everything
For several years my husband traveled frequently for work. Sales conferences. Team retreats. Client meetings across the country. He would leave on Monday and return on Thursday, and I would hold down the household with varying degrees of grace.
Those years were hard. The solo parenting stretches wore me down. The kids missed their father. And there was always a subtle resentment bubbling beneath the surface, even though we both knew his travel was necessary for our family’s financial stability.
What complicated my feelings further was knowing that some of his trips were genuinely enjoyable. His company worked with incentive travel companies to plan elaborate reward trips for top performers. These were not grueling business obligations. They were resort stays and team-building adventures designed to feel like vacations.
I remember him calling from one of these trips, describing the sunset from a beachfront dinner, while I scraped dried oatmeal off the kitchen floor with a screaming toddler attached to my leg. The contrast felt almost comical.
But here is what I eventually understood. That resentment was not really about him having nice experiences. It was about me feeling invisible in my own life. Feeling like travel and adventure belonged to his world while I managed the domestic machinery that made his absence possible.
Naming that feeling changed things. We started being more intentional about creating experiences for me too. Weekend getaways with friends while he stayed home. Small adventures that reminded me I was still a person with desires beyond keeping small humans alive.
The balance never became perfect. But it became more honest.
The Unexpected Lesson From Managing Property
Life has a way of teaching you things you never planned to learn. A few years ago we inherited a property from a family member. It was unexpected and complicated and forced us into decisions we felt completely unprepared to make.
The property was far from where we lived, in a different country entirely. Selling immediately felt wrong somehow. The place held memories. It represented a connection to family history we were not ready to sever. But managing a rental property from across an ocean while raising children seemed impossible.
We stumbled through the first year making every mistake imaginable. Trying to coordinate maintenance remotely. Dealing with tenant issues through email chains that spanned time zones. The mental load was enormous, and it fell mostly on me because my husband was still traveling so frequently for work.
Eventually we found a local property management company that took the chaos off our plates. The relief was immediate and profound. Suddenly the property was not a source of stress but a small passive income that actually supported our family goals.
But the deeper lesson was not about property management. It was about knowing when to ask for help. When to admit that doing everything yourself is not strength but stubbornness. When to let professionals handle what they handle best so you can focus on what only you can do.
That lesson has rippled through every area of my life since. I am quicker now to delegate. Quicker to acknowledge my limits. Quicker to recognize that martyrdom is not a parenting virtue.
What I Learned From Extended Family Travel
As our children grew, a new kind of travel emerged in our lives. The extended family trip. Grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles converging in one place for a week of controlled chaos.
These trips were my mother-in-law’s passion project. She believed deeply that cousins should know each other as more than faces on screens. That family bond required physical presence and shared experience. That the effort of bringing everyone together was worth whatever logistical nightmares it required.
She was right. But the early attempts were rough.
Hotel blocks with rooms scattered across different floors meant the family never actually gathered in one place. Kids knocked on the wrong doors at 6 AM. Adults retreated to their separate spaces instead of lingering together. The togetherness my mother-in-law envisioned kept slipping through the cracks.
The breakthrough came when we shifted to booking a group vacation home instead of hotel rooms. The first morning in that shared space, I understood immediately what had been missing before.
Children tumbled out of bedrooms and found their cousins already building block towers in the living room. Adults made coffee together and lingered at the kitchen island comparing notes on sleep and parenting and life. Meals happened around one enormous table instead of in scattered restaurant booths.
The physical togetherness created emotional togetherness. There was nowhere to retreat. Nowhere to hide. And in that gentle forced proximity, relationships deepened in ways that years of holiday video calls never achieved.
My kids now talk about those trips constantly. They remember specific games with specific cousins. They remember the teenager who taught them card tricks. They remember the grandmother who read them stories every night in a voice that made characters come alive.
Those memories would not exist without the shared space that held us all together.
The Rhythm of Coming Home
What strikes me now, looking back across all these travel experiences, is how much they taught me about home itself.
Home is not static. It is not just the house where we sleep most nights. Home is something we create and recreate constantly, in permanent spaces and temporary ones. In the rituals we carry with us and the presence we bring to wherever we land.
I have felt profoundly at home in rental houses where we stayed for a single week. I have felt homeless in my own living room during seasons of disconnection and stress. The walls matter less than what happens within them.
Travel taught me this. Every new place we entered as a family was a laboratory for understanding what we actually needed to feel settled. What rhythms and rituals were essential. What we could release and what we had to protect.
We need morning time. Slow mornings where no one rushes and everyone can ease into the day at their own pace. We need shared meals, even simple ones. We need outdoor space where the kids can be loud and physical without constant correction. We need evening wind-down time that is not dominated by screens.
These needs follow us everywhere. When we honor them, wherever we are feels like home. When we ignore them, even our own house feels foreign.
What Travel Gives Our Children
I think often about what we are teaching our children through all this travel. Not the educational stuff, though that matters too. The geography and history and exposure to different cultures.
I mean the deeper curriculum. The lessons they absorb without us explicitly teaching them.
They are learning that adventure is worth the effort. That discomfort is survivable. That new places and new people are interesting rather than threatening. They are learning flexibility. Patience. The ability to make themselves at home in unfamiliar circumstances.
They are also learning that family is the constant. That wherever we go, we go together. That the people matter more than the place.
These might be the most important lessons we ever give them. More important than any classroom content. More lasting than any achievement or accolade.
Still Learning
Our family’s travel story is still being written. The kids are getting older. Their interests are diverging. The logistics grow more complicated every year as schedules fill with activities and obligations.
But we keep making it happen. Keep carving out time to go somewhere together. Keep prioritizing the shared experiences that have shaped us so profoundly.
I do not know what the next chapter holds. What new forms our travel will take as children become teenagers and eventually adults. Whether we will still manage to gather in group houses and linger around large tables when everyone has their own lives pulling them in different directions.
What I know is that every trip has taught us something. About ourselves. About each other. About what it means to belong to a family that values presence and togetherness.
Those lessons are worth every cancelled flight, every tantrum in transit, every logistical headache that comes with traveling as a family. They are the invisible souvenirs we carry home. The ones that matter most.
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