Pre-Trip Archives – Parents with Passports

Universal Orlando Resort Trip Planning

June 22nd, 2024admin0 Comments

I am happy to say that taking a trip to the Orlando theme parks with teenagers requires less trip planning than it does with young kids! Forget laying out a detailed schedule for each day. Forget the websites that will literally give you a minute by minute itinerary. Forget any semblance of a tight schedule. Teens are different animals. Just plan the high level stuff and let them take it from there. The high level details I did have to plan included where to stay, which tickets to purchase, and which park to visit on which day. That was it! …

Utah Trip Planning

April 12th, 2024admin0 Comments

To my husband, an end of March / beginning of April spring break meant one thing… we could go skiing out west! To me, it meant we could go skiing out west AND add on something else. I really like to ski but 3 days is about my max. With a whole week of spring break, we had plenty of time to combine skiing with another location and activity. Because it tends to be a little warmer in spring outside of its ski areas, we chose Utah as our destination. Aside from great skiing, Utah also offers some amazing national …

Costa Rica Trip Planning

June 23rd, 2023admin0 Comments

I love trip planning – almost as much as taking the trip itself. I’ve planned trips for our family of 4, for my extended family of 14, and for vacations with one another family. But a trip with 4 families of friends was unchartered territory. 16 people ranging in age from 8 to 48 with differing interests, activity levels, and budgets was a whole new ball game. The travel logistics alone were daunting. Since we all wanted to still be friends at the end of the trip, it seemed best to bring in a travel agent to help us decide …

Portugal Trip Planning

April 22nd, 2022admin0 Comments

Portugal was actually our Plan B for spring break 2022. We had originally planned to do a multi-family trip to Costa Rica but that fell apart when Costa Rica instituted a vaccination requirement and several members of our extended group were unwilling or unable to get vaccinated. So we postponed that trip (ironically Costa Rica dropped their vaccine requirement about a week before we left) and planned a trip to Portugal for just our family. My husband and I have travelled fairly extensively throughout Europe but our boys have never been. We had Portugal high on our list of next …

Galapagos Trip Planning – Take 2

May 15th, 2021admin0 Comments

When international borders closed down in March 2020 due to Covid-19, our dream trip to the Galapagos was abruptly cancelled. In an optimistic (or perhaps naive) move, we moved our booking with Iguana Crossing to August 2020. This whole pandemic thing was new to everyone and it seemed unfathomable that the world would still be shut down in 5 months. Little did we know… Obviously August didn’t happen so spring break of 2021 seemed like the next plausible option. Iguana Crossing graciously let us rebook again for April 2021 and we collectively held out breath for the next 8 months. …

Florida Road Trip Planning and Itinerary

April 9th, 2021admin0 Comments

This was a fairly last minute trip so I didn’t do nearly as much planning as I usually do. I wish I could say that this trip opened my eyes to the wonders of spontaneous travel but the truth is, I am a planner at heart and not having travel plans stresses me out. This was especially true on this trip because my mother-in-law joined us and I really wanted to have a smooth, well-planned, fun itinerary for the whole family. I definitely felt like we had some bumps along the way, but in the year of Covid-19 and an …

Covid-19 Travel Cancellations

March 27th, 2020admin0 Comments

Two weeks from today, we were supposed to board a plane bound for Quito, Ecuador, embarking on a once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos Islands. At this stage, I thought I’d be confirming plans, making lists, and starting to pack. Instead, I’m cancelling flights, trying to rebook tours and hotels, and planning to see nothing but the inside of my own house for the foreseeable future. When Covid-19 first appeared in China in December 2019, few people would have predicted how it would impact the world in a matter of weeks. Quickly spreading from country to country through …

Galapagos Trip Planning

March 7th, 2020admin0 Comments

The Galapagos Islands! This bucket-list trip can be overwhelming to plan to say the least. Located more than 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, it is a difficult destination to get to. And with 127 islands in the archipelago (more than twenty of which can be explored), 9,000 wildlife species (many of them endemic to the islands), and other-worldly landscapes, the possibilities on the islands are endless. There is no way you can possibly ever see it all. The first and most important decision to make when planning a Galapagos trip is “land vs sea”. Do you want to …

Alaska Trip Planning

August 22nd, 2019admin0 Comments

We started our “decade of travel” with the kids in 2016 – the year my husband and I turned 40 and the year my oldest turned 8 (meaning he had 10 years left before leaving for college). Our goal during this time period is to take one big trip a year (preferably international) and as many small trips as we can fit in to explore locally and nationally. Alaska has long been on our bucket list, and we decided an Alaskan cruise leaving from Vancouver, Canada would fit the bill perfectly for 2019’s big trip. 2019 also happened to be …

Summer 2019 Road Trip

June 19th, 2019admin0 Comments

Every summer I fly up with the boys to NJ to spend a week visiting family. We’ll usually do some day trips or an overnight somewhere nearby. We’ve explored NYC, Philadelphia, and Hershey PA just to name a few. This summer I decided to change it up a little and turn it into a week-long road trip. Our final destination was Newport RI, largely because I had visited there in the fall with some girlfriends and absolutely loved it. But also because my youngest was devastated that I had visited “the world’s smallest state” without him. We’ve taken 8+ hour …