Tag: Travel

  • Cooperstown Dreams Park 2026

    We just got back from Cooperstown, from the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament, for my younger son. It’s a giant 12-year-old tournament they run up there, and I figured I’d sort of jot down some of our thoughts from the stay — what worked and what didn’t, both for Cooperstown in general and for the tournament,…

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  • Dress to Impress (Who, Exactly? The Fine People of Portugal Obviously.)

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    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…

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  • Paris, September 2024: Tag Along Trip

    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…

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  • Updated My Travel Fit, Watch Out Portugal

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    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…

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  • Rainy February in Portugal with Two Kids (13 & 12)

    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…

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  • Spider Eyes

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    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…

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  • Crashed My Bike Trying to Avoid a Garter Snake, And Then My Dog Wanted In On The Action

    We live right next to the rail trail — our property literally borders it — so we end up using it a lot. I walk the dog there. I ride my bike. The section closest to us is the rough version, just packed dirt that gets muddy after rain and stays covered in sticks and…

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  • My Clothing Philosophy (Who Even Has One Of Those?)

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    If you’ve been following my ongoing clothing saga — the chore coat search, the Red Wing chronicles, the light duty boot quest — you might have noticed that I have opinions. Strong ones. Possibly unreasonably strong ones for someone who spends a meaningful portion of his life mowing a lawn and cutting firewood. But here…

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  • The Versatile Waterproof Sneaker Every Sports Parent Needs

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    My footwear requirements are not unreasonable: keep my feet dry when it’s below 60°F, survive muddy youth sports sidelines, and let me do something vaguely athletic if my kid needs a catch partner during warmups. That’s the list. Almost nothing on the market does all three. Waterproof hiking boots are everywhere, but hiking boots are…

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  • A Scandinavian Family Adventure

    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…

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  • NYC Family Staycation with Kids 12 & 11

    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…

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  • Electrolux Washer Review: The Second-Floor Guarantee That Wasn’t

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    I’d had Electrolux earmarked as our next washer practically from the day we bought our LG in 2010. Our LG was reliable, but when it hit the spin cycle it shook the whole house like a small earthquake. With laundry on the second floor, that’s less an inconvenience than a structural concern. When our thirteen-year-old…

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  • Montreal with Kids 10 & 9

    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…

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  • Jungle to Beach: Our Spring Break Family Adventure in Belize with Kids 11 & 10

    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…

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  • Snowboarding: $30. Urgent Care: $3,000

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    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…

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  • Iceland with Kids 10 & 8

    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…

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  • A Memorial Journey Through Germany with Kids 10 & 9

    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…

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  • DC with Kids 9 & 8

    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…

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  • Woom Bikes: The Ultimate Kids Bike Brand

    When I was looking to get our kids started on bikes, I did a lot of research. Two things came out of it: training wheels are a bad idea, and the right place to start is a balance bike. After the balance bike stage, what mattered most was weight and kid-specific ergonomics — bikes actually…

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  • Williamsburg with Kids 7 & 6

    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…

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  • Ireland with Kids 6 & 5 and Family: A Comedy of Errors and Emerald Isle Magic

    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…

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  • Tulum with Kids 5 & 4

    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…

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