Welcome to Travel Babbo

Welcome to Travel Babbo!  For years I've been posting about family trips on Facebook, trying to inspire others to take their kids to crazy places too.  I want to do the same through this blog.

I've been to 65 countries and seven continents.  As a child I saw some of Europe and the South Pacific on family trips, but my travel addiction really began in college when I studied in Florence, Italy for a year and Heidelberg, Germany for a semester.  Every weekend was a 3-day weekend, and the goal was to see as much as possible in those three days.  This was in the days before cheap, easy intra-Europe flights, so traveling meant taking overnight trains - not the most comfortable mode of travel, but it worked, and I saw much of Europe.  Once I graduated from college and grad school I kept it going.  Email and international cell coverage made it easy to do my job remotely. Digital photography added a new creative element to the travel.  I studied Norwegian a couple of summers in Oslo.  I met up with friends around the world.  My goal was to see at least five new countries a year, which I managed for several years.

And then I got married.  Travel with my wife was just as fun.  Then we had kids, and it got really fun.  I fully understand that a lot of people like taking breaks from their kids and heading overseas without them.  We're not like that.  Two of our kids got to Europe before their first birthdays, and our third at 16 months.  Our oldest daughter took her first steps in Kinsale, Ireland.  Early trips with the kids included taking our son to Portugal for a wedding when he was 11 months and exploring the country by car, and picking up a Volvo at the factory in Sweden with a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old and exploring Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, visiting every amusement park we could find.  I took my daughter to Australia when she was four, Hong Kong when she was five and Antarctica when she turned eight. We took all three, at 1, 3 and 5 years old, on a Disney cruise through the Mediterranean and then rented a villa outside of Cortona, Italy for a month.  Every school break brings new countries and new experiences.  Is it all easy?  Of course not.  For years two of our kids threw up virtually every time they were on a plane or on a long car ride.  But the positives far outweigh the negatives.  There are innumerable benefits to travel from birth - a greater global perspective and a comfort level with all people are just two.  An ability to navigate European train stations is an important third.  The kids study Spanish and Mandarin in school.  We want to them to use the languages in practical situations.

All of our kids are shy to some extent.  To see our oldest daughter at five walk across a park in Italy solo to order a snack in Italian, and to watch our son finally, after two weeks in Paris, order the bread that he wanted, in French, from the neighborhood Boulangerie, are truly priceless experiences.

Upcoming posts will detail our trips with the kids: the things that we've learned and the places we've discovered.  There are a lot of ways to travel with kids - the most important thing is just doing it.  Just book a trip and go.  But there are definitely ways to do it more comfortably, like playing the frequent flier mile game to get upgrades whenever possible, and staying in apartments instead of hotels.  I will provide information about what we've discovered in various cities and countries that are outside of the normal tourist track to not only inspire but to add specific ideas to your itineraries. And if you have discovered things that I've missed, please let me know.  I'm constantly frustrated with the results when I Google "things to do in (insert destination here) with kids", so I want to add to the (reliable) online content and fill in some of the gaps.

As for the Travel Babbo title... Last year I was lucky enough to win Conde Nast Traveler Magazine's Photo of the Year / Dream Trip contest.  The magazine planned an amazing two weeks in Florence for us.  The first two days there three different people called me Babbo - Italian for Dad or Daddy.  The kids started using it and it stuck - they haven't called me Dad since we returned from that trip.  Actually, Babbo only means Dad in northern Italy.  In southern Italy it means Idiot.  I'm pretty sure the kids mean the former - most of the time.