You only have 18 summers!

“One day…we’re going to take the kids to Hawaii!”, “We really want to travel over to Europe, but we’re waiting until the kids are older” ; “We really want to go out West and see the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, but out summers are just too busy”.  Do any of those statements sound familiar to you?   The average American family doesn’t think they spend enough time together (guilty).  Between school, work, sports, and extracurricular activities it’s no surprise that we are all feeling disconnected and burned out. The best way to reconnect with your loved ones is to get away. No distractions and no excuses: just you and your kids (or Grandkids) spending “quality time”, enjoying each other’s company and maybe even experiencing an unfamiliar culture together.  “Next Year, maybe” turns into the year after that..and so forth..until you “blink” and are sitting at their high school graduation wondering what the hell happened!

Travel is proven to be a wonderful learning tool for children.  Seeing how people live in other countries can open their minds and hearts and expand their imagination exponentially. Here are a few things that travel can provide for your family:

1.  It can create lasting relationships..both between your own family members and people you meet while on the road.  These folks that you run into along the way give you a glimpse of what life is like outside your regular circle of friends and can give you a fresh perspective on how other cultures live.   I remember one dinner in Lausanne Switzerland when a spiked-hair, and heavily tattooed Aussie spent some time joking with Kendall and playing with her kids’ meal toy.  At home, she would probably have been scared to death of him!
2. You can learn another language…There is something very exciting about being able to throw around a few words of French, knowing how to say hello and thank you in Portuguese, or ordering off of a menu written totally in Italian…and hoping you don’t end up with something inedible!  And..knowing that if you do accidentally order goat’s testicals, that your whole family will still be laughing about it 20 years from now!
3. It gives you and your kids perspective…Meeting folks from other cultures will teach you that the way you look at the world (maybe through the distorted lens of our mass media) is not the way everybody does – and that you could be dead wrong about some things!  We have had many meaningful conversations about why Europe is so far ahead of the U.S. in its transportation infrastructure, why people of Native Hawaiian descent still protest becoming a US state,  and why so few French and Italian teenagers feel the deep temptation to drink alcohol to excess like ours do here in America.  Logan was fascinated that about 80% of the locals we met in Italy said…”AAAhhhhh, Asheville?” when he told them he was from North Carolina.  Who knew?

Are you reading this and thinking “Boy…I’ve always wanted to see the Pacific Ocean with my kids”?  If you want to do it now, you’ve probably always wanted to.  You’ve imagined it, daydreamed about it, envisioned it.  Guess what?  Now’s the time to DO IT!  I have several vacations on my desk right now for folks just like you, who are wanting to finally take their 16 and 21 year olds to Europe before they are “gone”…or who are celebrating a high school graduation with a trip to Hawaii – the destination chosen by their son.  Remember…you only have 18 summers!