On the Road to Find Out
Excerpt from the book, Family Adventures

By the time we became parents, my wife Ashlyn and I had been living in Europe for more than four years. The arrival of our first child—like the arrival of all first children—marked the end of an era, a brief but golden chapter of life that we now realize we often took for granted. For years, we had lived simply, focused on our careers, and traveled every chance we could. We had spent summers in Italy, autumns in Paris, springtime in Spain. Looking back, it seems impossible that we ever had the ability to move so freely or travel so lightly. Back then, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. 

And then, in August of 2016, Owen was born. That summer, we wondered if it was time to return home to the U.S. for good. Our future was hazy, bordering on opaque. But then we had an idea: what if we spent a year “abroad in America” to reconnect with family and friends, and get reacquainted with our homeland? Traveling was something we knew how to do, and—we had heard—newborns were easy companions. It sounded like the adventure of a lifetime. How hard could it be? 

In October, as we flew west over the Atlantic, we still didn’t know all the things we didn’t know; about being parents, about life on the road with an infant, about what our marriage would look like with Owen in the mix. But it didn’t take long to realize that our days as a pair of beach-lounging, paperback-reading, long-dinner-having wanderers were over. It seems obvious, of course: having a baby changes everything. But, like the other families in this book, we had to experience this new reality for ourselves. 

Over the next 10 months, we visited 21 American states, driving more than 25,000 miles as we journeyed from Florida to California, and from Texas to Wisconsin. We lived out of two suitcases. We swam in two oceans. We stood in the shadows of great sequoias and at the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We voted. We went to Disney World. We found new friends and dug up old ones. We met oyster hunters in Charleston, a drag queen in Brooklyn, off-the-grid loners in the desert, and an ornery bear lumbering around our Airbnb near Yosemite. Most significantly, we watched our son bloom from a babbling baby into a quirky, stubborn, wonderful little boy who refused to fall asleep in the car unless we turned Chance the Rapper “up to 11.” Frankly, we stumbled our way through that first year as parents, laughing and weeping in equal measure. We learned to let go of a lot during that first family adventure. But we discovered a lot too. Bottom line, we survived a year on the road with a baby. Would we do it all again, knowing what we know now? Maybe not. But would we trade away that adventurous first year as a family, rediscovering America together? Not for all the sourdough in San Francisco.

It was during this year of traveling, that I began wondering about how and why other parents continue to explore the world even after having children. The profiles in the following pages are a partial answer to that question. They offer a window into some of the inspiring ways that moms and dads are passing on a legacy of adventurous living to their kids. The stories in this book will take you from the deserts of Morocco to tropical Oahu, from the Amazon River to the Ionian Sea, and from the bustling markets of India to a soba-noodle party on a farm outside of Tokyo.

Some of these stories are about unique family vacations. Others focus on parents who want to instill a love of travel by exposing their children to life changing, round-the-world journeys. Still others remind us how much we can learn from exploring the wonders hiding in plain sight—in our hometowns, our backyards, or that shady stand of pine trees we’ve driven past for years. But what all of these stories have in common, is their celebration of two of life’s most challenging and rewarding endeavors: traveling and parenting.

These are real-life tales of moms and dads braving the unavoidable struggles of travel—flight delays, lost luggage, middle-of-nowhere engine breakdowns, and middle-of-everyone emotional meltdowns—to share new experiences with their kids. As all of these parents will tell you, traveling with kids is never easy. But the benefits can be invaluable. What could be more important than introducing our children to cultures where families, not so unlike our own, look and live and speak and eat differently than we do. What could be more useful than giving them the tools to deal with the challenges encountered on the road. Hannah Carpenter, whose family decamped to Italy for three months, sums up the complex beauty of family travel especially well. “Traveling with your family is incredible, and, at times, it’s also incredibly awful. When you travel, you are still you, and your kids are still your kids. There’s no magic travel dust that turns you all into the best versions of yourselves once you cross the Atlantic. You will fight and cry and fantasize about getting off one stop ahead of them on your train rides.” But, she says, “Travel is a cure for so much of the bad that infects people. We know that the more we expose our kids to other cultures and places, the more likely they are to be more inclusive, open-minded, creative, and willing to take risks. We hope this experience has ignited a wanderlust in them, and a willingness to think more broadly about the world and their place in it.” 

Taking risks, overcoming challenges, discovering beauty, and opening our minds and hearts. These are the things we hope for each time we pack our bags, load the car, or board a plane. This is why we leave home and head into the unknown. No matter how old we are, each of us wants to be filled with awe and to feel fully alive. And we want to share these experiences with the people we love the most, so that these moments of wonder might live on for years to come.

Originally published in Family Adventures: Exploring the World With Children (Gestalten, 2020).