Thoughts on adding adventure to your busy family life
“What good is livin’ this life you were given if all you do is stand in one place?” -Lord Huron (Ends of The Earth)
Confession time, this is my (J) favorite topic. I spent some of my late twenties and most of my thirties itching the scratch of a bad case of wanderlust, and in that span got to see the world and put a lot of stamps on my passport. Part of that impetus was figuring out how to play the game of cheap travel deals, something that many others have written about elsewhere and which has largely, but not entirely faded from the golden era of the 2010s.
So while we may address cheap travel deals elsewhere, here we want to focus on how travel and adventure fit into our household and our philosophy.
The beginning is really with a moment of asking you to stop and reflect on the times in your life where you either traveled to a new country, or at least a new and very different location that you have never been to before. Odds are you can remember it more vividly than you remember what you did two weeks ago on a Tuesday. Senses and memories come alive when our brains engage with something new, and experiencing that ourselves in addition to introducing it to our kids, is part of the allure of travel. I can remember many details from my family’s trip to Mexico when I was five years old, but I can’t remember a single detail from what I was doing exactly one month ago at this time, at least not without looking at a calendar.
We also talk a lot with our kids about both how good we have it in our country and also how different other cultures and countries are from our home. The better way to do this is to show them and have them experience it. The world becomes smaller, and less scary, and we all find out how much the narratives and news headlines we see are at best incomplete, and at worst, misleading.
Let’s start with what we mean by adventure. Because many people think that travel or adventure means some big once-every-few-years trip to Europe where you realize you will never be able to afford to send your kids to college after you return. Those big, expensive, gosh-darn-it-kids-don’t-you-understand-how-amazing-this-is-so-why-can’t-you-behave-and-be-grateful-like-you-should-be trips have their place, but it’s really a tip of the iceberg. Let us encourage you to think a little differently and start smaller.
Adventure starts with the concept of serendipity:
ser·en·dip·i·ty
[ˌserənˈdipədē]
NOUN
the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way:
Serendipity is really one of the major components that makes life fun, it’s where memories tend to occur, and where relationships are strengthened through experience. While we are big proponents of rhythms and schedules, we have to watch out that we don’t let them stand without contrast. Monotony is the gremlin (not the cute little mogwai, but the ugly Gremlins 2 versions) that tries to wrestle serendipity away from us. Schedule and repetition has its place, we have to make space for profound moments we’ll tell as a story around a table some day.
Start small.
When you have a few hours of downtime, it’s easy to let the kids flop in front of the TV/iPad/phone, hide in your room, and follow Jimmy Buffett’s advice that it’s five o’clock somewhere. This is a valid approach sometimes, let’s be honest! But, rather than having a mindset of any space of time where escapism is the goal, shifting the mindset toward an adventure mindset can be powerful.
What can small bits of adventure look like practically? It can be as simple as (real life examples from us):
Walking / riding bikes around the park loop in town
Having a family one-mile race at sunset around the middle school track
Get pizza and hang out at the open-air mall near our house
Buy Starbucks and go watch the planes come and go at the airport
Playing pick-up baseball as a family with the neighbors
Going for a hike
Exploring the library
Drive through some are of your town/city you haven’t spent time in and stop somewhere you find interesting
Go pick up some fast food, picnic in a forest preserve or park
Make brown bag lunches and go take them to some of the homeless population (if you live in or near a city)
Run a bunch of errands together, finish it up with Mcdonalds ice cream cones. Bonus if you get them on $.50 cone days
Bake something together
Water balloon fight. Hundreds of water balloons. This is war.
Adventure can be small (at least to you) in terms of the time, expense, and wow-factor, but as parents we sometimes forget that kids don’t see it through the same lens. And even when in the moment they complain, their memories can often be bigger and more fond than we realize. At the same time, even little meanderings like the ones above, can help you find things your family really likes (ours loves watching planes at the airport, for example).
What about medium-sized ideas? Depending on your kids’ ages what you can/want to do will vary, but usually there are activities that cut across a wide swath of ages. We are biased toward not spending money, but that’s not always possible. Here’s some real-life ones to consider:
Use hotel points and stay a night some place interesting in a nearby city
Take a day trip to a beach/river park/lake
Rent a boat with another family or two and spend the day on a lake (we are making the bold assumption you have lakes somewhere nearby, sorry Arizona 🙂
Camp in the backyard, overnight
Go to a minor-league / college sports game, especially if it’s a sport your kids play themselves
Serve with a local church/charity on some community needs. Many have easy ways to sign up and help out for even a few hours. Examples include hanging out with the elderly, serving meals to the homeless, cleaning up community centers, gardening, etc.
Yeah yeah, okay you got it, but what about big adventures? And what if you can’t drop serious coin every time you want to make some big, splashy memory? I’ll write separately more about the “how” to save money on travel, but for now, let’s just focus on the concepts. Some real life “big adventures” we’ve done as a family:
Find huge travel deals and take the kids to Europe for a week
Rent a huge beach house/lake house with friends for a long weekend.
Cruise time!
Road trip to some relatives or friends you rarely see
Spend time in national parks
We also subscribe to an idea originally proffered to us by Bob Goff, the idea of a “ten year old trip”. The basic idea being that once each of your kids turns ten, they can take a trip with one of you somewhere in the world (or wherever you want to draw the boundary) for a few days and experience something new and exciting together. This has proven powerful not just because of the experience, but it fostered a love of travel in E after spending time with dad in Costa Rica, and also has created a lot of buzz, talk, and dreaming by the kids long prior to any trip happening. It gets their minds turning.
On that note, let’s linger for one moment on that idea of doing things with the kids individually. If you are like us, trying to grab the whole family and do stuff is some combo of expensive, time consuming, loud, difficult, insanity-inducing, all of the above. We have also noticed over the years as they get older it has also brought out growing amounts of competition, abrasion, and challenging personalities. This doesn’t mean those times aren’t important, but something we have found that unlocked a lot of quality time and behavior from our kids is a simple version of the ten-year-old trip: individual time. Running errands, making a meal together individually, spending a day as one parent with one child, going on a long hike with one child, spending a long weekend in another country with them. These all are powerful, and our kids let their guards down a lot more when it’s just one on one with a parent instead of trying to fight for attention and dominance among their siblings.
None of this is rocket science, but we have found these things work. And memories happen! Adventure is powerful, and it not only sticks with everyone along the way, but it changes perspectives, removes fear, and sometimes maybe even makes siblings be kinder to each other.
So to recap some of the key points:
Be intentional about adventure, however small!
Serendipity occurs when we break out of the monotony of schedules and routine
Big adventures doesn’t have to mean big expense (or at least a lot less than you think)
Spend individual time with your kids adventuring
Consider adopting the concept of a ten-year-old trip in your family