We went to Belize a couple springs back — Spring Break 2024, jungle half of the trip at Sleeping Giant Rainforest Lodge — and I learned something there that I cannot unlearn. It doesn’t bother me, exactly. But it has rewired how I look at my own yard at night, and I don’t think there’s…
My wife Jennifer had to go to Paris for work and she was kind enough to buy me a plane ticket so I could come with her. I’ve done this before — tagged along to Vietnam once, Kauai another time — and I’ve learned that seeing a place through the lens of someone else’s work…
If you read my Portugal post, you know how this started. Jennifer had opinions about my travel wardrobe. The citizens of Lisbon had opinions about my travel wardrobe. I came home suitably chastened and with a list of things to replace. Well, I’ve replaced most of them. This is the follow-up I promised — what…
We just got back from Portugal and it was fantastic. Lisbon, Porto, the hills, the pastéis de nata, the Super Bock — loved all of it. I dress for the weather. I dress for the walking. I dress to stay dry and not have to check a bag. Apparently Portugal noticed. So did Jennifer. They…
We had to go to Portugal in early February for Jennifer’s AIMA residency appointment, which is the kind of thing you don’t get to schedule. They tell you the date, you show up. We figured if we had to be in Portugal anyway, we’d escape the sub-zero temperatures at home, pull the kids out of…
When we asked Nonna and Grandpa Charles where they wanted to go for their big trip, we secretly hoped they’d say somewhere warm. The kids had been lobbying hard for Italy or Japan. Charles is Swedish though, and Swedish heritage was always going to win that conversation. So Sweden it was, with Norway tacked on…
We had our 11 and 12-year-olds on spring break and a big Scandinavia trip planned with the grandparents in May, so we decided to keep things local. “Local” being a relative term — we live 70 miles north of NYC and somehow decided what the family really needed was a couple of days of urban…
We wanted to feel like we’d traveled somewhere foreign without spending a day in airports getting there. Montreal is the easiest version of that from the Hudson Valley. Five hours in the car, you cross a border, the signs change to French, and you’re somewhere else. We pulled the kids out of school early on…
By spring break 2024 we’d done three cold-weather trips in a row — Ireland, Iceland, Germany — and we’d had enough of packing fleeces in March. We wanted heat. We wanted not to rent a car. We wanted a flight that wasn’t a brutal haul. Belize hit all of it, and we’d loved the Yucatán…
I spent a good part of my teenage and college winters skiing, and I’d always wanted to share that with our kids. But here’s the thing: skiing (or snowboarding) is now REALLY expensive. Rentals, helmets, tickets, clothing — it adds up to more than $1,000 for a family of four. All for an outing our…
By fall 2022 we were finally crawling out of the COVID years and wanted to do something that felt like a real trip again. Play Airlines had just started flying out of Stewart — our regional airport, twenty minutes from the house — which made Iceland suddenly stupid-easy to get to. Henry was 10, Elias…
The trip to Germany was supposed to happen earlier. Originally spring 2022, to visit my mom, who was living there with my sister. We postponed when my sister tested COVID-positive days before departure, then postponed again when our younger son tested positive the morning we were supposed to leave. Then in May, my mom died…
Between Christmas and New Year’s 2021 we’d had enough of the Hudson Valley in winter and decided to take the boys — Henry 9, Elias 7 — down to DC for the first time. The pandemic was still rolling along in its second-year exhaustion phase, and four days of walking a city with two kids…
April 14-19, 2019. Drove down from the Hudson Valley with Henry, 7, and Elias, 6. Five nights at the Williamsburg Lodge. The most important thing I can tell you about Colonial Williamsburg with kids in this age range is the muskets. Every single child in the historic district is carrying one — wooden replica long…
Norwegian Air briefly offered direct flights from Stewart Airport to Dublin in 2018 (RIP Norwegian Air, we hardly knew ye), which is the kind of opportunity you don’t pass up when you live in the Hudson Valley and the alternative is dragging two small kids and two grandparents through JFK. So in March we packed…
After another brutal New York winter we wanted sun, so we picked Tulum, which Jennifer and I had loved on pre-kid trips. January 2017. Henry was 5, Elias was 4. The plan was relaxed, uncrowded, familiar. Logistics: JetBlue out of JFK, reserved parking. Lightweight, narrow travel car seats designed for getting through airports without dislocating…
Even that's Odd