Don’t wait to travel with your kids until they’re the perfect age! You never know what’s around the corner to mess up your plans. And really, does the perfect age even exist?
Want to travel with your kids?
You’ve come to the right place for inspiration. Here we share our family travel tips, personal reviews, and itineraries for global travel adventures!
We’re the Lynn Family, aka ‘TraveLynn Family’ – Jenny (Mum), Jay (Dad), Arthur (age 12) and Ezra (age 11). We’re from the UK, but for the past 2 years we’ve lived in Malaysia, and we’ve been travelling as a family to off-the-beaten track destinations ever since the boys were born.
Our ‘big’ trips include:
- 6 weeks backpacking Indonesia – Java, Bali, Lombok (2026)
- 6 weeks road tripping Western Australia (2025)
- 45 days backpacking Vietnam (2024)
- 10 weeks backpacking Southeast Asia (2023)
- slow travelling and living in Morocco for 4 months (2022)
- a full summer of Bongo vanlife in France (2021)
- 101 days traversing Africa in a Land Rover (2018)
- trekking the Himalayas (2018)
- living in India for a year (2017)
But whilst we love off-the-beaten-track adventures, we also love European city breaks and occasionally treating ourselves to a bit of luxury (check out our review of our recent stay at Rixos Marina Abu Dhabi).
TraveLynn Family was established in 2016 and has grown to be one of the top family travel blogs in the UK, receiving 200,000 page views per month to this website and with an engaged following of over 27k on Instagram and 14k on Facebook.
Where we’ve been
Discover all the destinations we’ve travelled to as a family, from African safaris to Southeast Asian islands. Click on a pin to find detailed guides and inspiration for your next adventure.
TraveLynn Chats
Book in for a TraveLynn Chat! This is a 1 hour video call over Google Meet to discuss your family travel plans and goals with us.
🌍 Perhaps you want to take the kids out of school for a term and travel.
🌍 Perhaps you want to travel Southeast Asia for an extended length of time and want to chat about your itinerary.
🌍 Perhaps you want to take a family gap year and don’t know how to go about it or where to start.
🌍 Perhaps you feel like you’re in a rut with life at home, and need an inspirational chat to make steps towards a digital nomad life.
Our style of travel
Travel for us isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime experience, nor have we sold up and hit the road fulltime, homeschooling our kids. In fact, our boys love their school, their friends and their clubs, and us parents need the childcare of school to be able to work. But travel is a huge part of our lives and we embrace the philosophy of worldschooling.
Since the boys were born, we have found ways to travel as much as possible; living overseas, saving funds and quitting jobs, deregistering our boys from UK school, creating remote work, and of course, learning the tricks and rewards of budget family travel… we’ve learned to be quite creative!
Our longer adventures allow us to embrace slow family travel. Rather than jumping from one place to another to cram as much as possible in, we are happy to spend weeks (and sometimes months) in the one country. This is a deeper travel, a more rewarding travel, where the natural daily routines of staying in the one place for a big chunk of time allows you to feel part of the local community. It’s also a much cheaper way to travel as you’re money goes further.
Do we ‘home educate’ when we travel? Oh no. That’s not our bag. Instead, online learning has worked brilliantly for us at time when the boys haven’t been registered in school. But now in the tween years the boys attend an international school with lots of holidays that allows us plenty of travel opportunities from our Penang base in beautiful Malaysia.
Our current travel plans
As with pretty much every year for us, 2025 was full of adventure! From jungle trekking and volcano climbs in Sumatra, to discovering nearby Ipoh, and island hopping across Thailand where the boys got to try scuba diving for the first time. Summer then took us back to Australia for a six-week road trip through Western Australia, and then a week in Dubai where the boys got a taste of the waterparks and theme parks, before a trip home to the UK for Christmas.
READ: TraveLynn Family 2025 travel round up
This year so far, Thailand has featured prominently with a return to Koh Lipe, where the boys completed their PADI Junior Open Water certification, as well as a fantastic 10-day trip from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi (taking the sleeper train from Malaysia rather than flying), which was the perfect mix of culture, history and jungle fun. We’ve also been able to enjoy a long weekend in Langkawi due to public holidays in Malaysia.
But the big trip this year was 6 weeks backpacking Indonesia from Jakarta to Lombok taking in the full width of Java, onto Bali, and then Lombok, where we particularly loved Gili Air.
There’s still a couple of local SEAsia trips on the agenda before the year is up. Follow us on Facebook or Instagram for regular updates of our travels.
Independent family travel tips
Online schooling for family travel
TIPS FOR BACKPACKING WITH KIDS
WHAT IS WORLDSCHOOLING?
packing light for family travel
HOW WE AFFORD TO TRAVEL
taking parental leave to travel
Latest on the blog
- Pramuka Island with Kids: Visiting Indonesia’s Thousand Islands
Pramuka Island is a small, laid-back island in Indonesia’s Thousand Islands, just a 90-minute boat ride from Jakarta. This was one of the first stops on our six-week Indonesia itinerary, after visiting Jakarta, and ended… - Indonesia with kids: 6 weeks through Java, Bali and Lombok
Planning a family trip to Indonesia? Our six-week itinerary takes you from the chaos of Jakarta and volcanoes of Java to the beaches of Bali and diving around Lombok, all without taking a single internal… - Visiting Erawan National Park from Kanchanaburi: jungle hikes and waterfall swims
Erawan National Park is one of the most visited parks in Thailand, attracting crowds of domestic and overseas tourists each year. Located close to Kanchanaburi, it’s an easy day trip from town and an excellent… - Watching a Muay Thai fight at Bangkok’s Rajadamnern Stadium with kids
Rajadamnern Stadium is regarded as the true home of Muay Thai, and its central Bangkok location makes it popular with tourists, locals and aficionados alike. Fights take place every night of the week so, whenever… - River Kwai Jungle Rafts REVIEW: a floating jungle retreat in Thailand
River Kwai Jungle Rafts is a floating jungle retreat accessible only by boat. We’d stayed here (pre-kids) twenty years ago, and were excited to return to see if it had maintained the off-grid vibe we… - Visiting Ayutthaya with kids: an easy day trip on the train from Bangkok
Ayutthaya is the historic former capital of Thailand, famous for its UNESCO-listed temple ruins, river-island setting, and rich Siamese heritage. It’s an easy and rewarding day trip from Bangkok, offering a completely different feel from…
