There’s a small window in family life that no one really prepares you for.
It’s the time before school begins, when your family still moves entirely to its own rhythm. Before term dates, routines and calendars quietly start dictating where (well, mostly when) you can go.
For us, that window arrived at exactly the right moment.
Barry and I had both been fortunate enough to receive three-month sabbaticals from work, and thanks to an inheritance from Barry’s grandfather, we had the means to do something we’d always dreamed about. Travel had shaped both of our lives long before we became parents. We’d travelled independently in our twenties, explored the world together as a couple and, through my career, I’d been lucky enough to experience many remarkable places.
We wanted to share that same sense of curiosity with our daughter, so before she started school, we packed our bags and set off on an eleven-week journey through Canada, California, Hawaii, Costa Rica and Mexico. It remains one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
Plenty of people thought we were slightly mad, particularly when we told them we were travelling through Mexico with a four-year-old, and we were often asked whether there was any point when she probably wouldn’t remember much of it anyway. Perhaps she won’t remember every destination, but that was never really the point.
What stays with us now isn’t the route we took or how many places we managed to fit in, but all the little moments along the way. Standing beneath the trees in Costa Rica watching a sloth carrying its baby. Wandering the colourful streets of Oaxaca (which quickly became one of my favourite places in the world!) and watching our daughter stand in front of Niagara Falls, take in this supposedly awe-inspiring sight and announce simply, “It’s yucky.”
Of course, eleven weeks of travelling with a four-year-old wasn’t completely seamless. One missed connection managed to turn what should have been a two-hour flight into a nine-hour journey via Bogotá. At the time it felt like a nightmare; now it’s one of those stories we laugh about. Travel has a funny way of doing that: some of the moments that feel disastrous at the time eventually become part of the story.
As the weeks passed, we watched our daughter become more confident and independent, and increasingly willing to try things she’d never done before. She embraced the unexpected far more readily than we did at times, which was a lovely reminder that children are often much more adaptable than we give them credit for.
It also changed the way I think about family travel. Today, when I’m creating a holiday for a family, I rarely start by asking which hotel has the biggest kids’ club or the longest list of organised activities. I’m much more interested in how a place might make the whole family 'feel'. Whether it will encourage a child with an obscure interest to be curious (reptiles in our house!), whether the parents will love being there just as much, and whether there will be those little moments of discovery that they’ll still be talking about years later.
Because when I look back at those eleven weeks, it isn’t really the flights, hotels or even individual destinations that I think about first. More than anything, I remember the feeling of having time: lingering over breakfast because there was nowhere we needed to be, stopping because something had caught our attention and allowing a day to unfold without constantly looking at the clock.
That trip taught me a lot about travelling with children, but perhaps the biggest thing was that the greatest luxury isn’t always where you stay or how much you spend.
Sometimes, it’s simply having that time to slow down together.
