Hello! I am happy you found me and I can’t wait to get to know you. I started blogging our travels a few years ago on a different blog site and decided that people weren’t finding me, so here we are. (This is good advice for travel – don’t be afraid to pivot from your initial plan 🙂 ) I am slowly moving things over, please be patient, and please do me a favor and share this site with anyone you might think would find it helpful.
My heart and passion is travel, especially if you need help getting the courage or the inspiration to travel with your young kids, I want to help! If you are overwhelmed or don’t know where to start, start small! Or if finances are the problem, I’d love to share the knowledge I have about travel hacking, or point you to someone that does it better. Use Google flights, leave the destination as anywhere, and see where the sky will take you! Or sign up for a cheap flights newsletter – that’s how we ended up going to Oslo. Our tickets were $200 each from JFK to Oslo, we just had to book flights from DFW to JFK. (Side note – the girls were under 2 for this trip so they could be lap children for the entire trip, but we opted to purchase seats on the long haul flight and I’m not sure Cameron has made a better travel call to date haha!) But all that to say, be flexible! At that point in my travel journey, I never would have said, “hey, let’s go to Oslo.” But what I see now is that Oslo can just be a jumping off point. We drove up into the fjords and saw so many beautiful waterfalls that we got desensitized. “Oh look, another waterfall.” It actually turned out to be a beautiful trip, and Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were all very child friendly. Can we just take a moment for all of the amazing playgrounds in Europe?? Like, I’m excited to go and explore more of them!
I originally caught the travel bug after an amazing and eye opening experience my junior year of high school, through a missions trip to lead English camps in Poland. It was never about the English, though, it was about showing Jesus’ love to the mostly Catholic youth of Poland. But I fell in love with experiencing a different culture and interacting with amazing new people. Luckily, I was able to drag Cameron into this obsession of mine, after our honeymoon to Cancun. We always find the most random adventures whenever we travel, even if the destination was to an all inclusive in Cancun. We tried to take the local bus to Walmart and even though we ended up in a sketchy neighborhood, the adventure of it all was something we still remember. I loved seeing the old ladies set up at the bus stop with a giant pot of something delicious cooking (even if we weren’t brave enough to try it after the earlier bout of food poisoning we got from an excursion). We had so much fun exploring the different things in the store (which was not Walmart, never did make it there) I’m sure the locals thought we were crazy.
But really, for whatever reason, on our travels Cameron and I always find ourselves in such crazy situations that I could never have dreamed up. From watching a bike race on a hello kitty TV in the only bar open in a tiny Switzerland town just over the Italian border, where the owner wouldn’t let us pay for our drinks and shared some of the most amazing polenta that I’ve had to being treated to delicious wild boar pasta and a giant Florentine t-bone steak in the apartment of the owner of the agriturismo in Tuscany while we all struggled to list all of the state capitals in the US with him and his non English speaking wife. Not to mention watching someone attempt to give a pigeon CPR next to the canal in Venice… I already have memories to last a life time, and we aren’t stopping anytime soon!
Now we get to show the world to our 3 adventure loving children. We have so much fun reading books about the places we are going to visit or have visited. Jackson loves to bring me books where he finds mention of the Eiffel tower or the places in the UK that were shared about in his knights and castle find from the library, “Can we go there, Mama!?” We read about the important buildings, landmarks and of course, the foods that we have to try. We have been very lucky that they are all pretty adventurous with food, but there are always times that we have to stop and remember that they are still small children, and it’s ok to have pizza and nuggets and fries. At least it can usually be done with a view. And even though it’s not always picture perfect moments, the memories are truly priceless.
Well, now that you know a little about me, please comment and let me know your favorite place to visit or best travel story that you have. I’d love to hear!
Everywhere on our list 