“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; I think the pandemic has taught everyone that. And really, does the ‘perfect age’ even exist? “
Jenny Lynn, Mum and Editor of TraveLynn Family
Want to travel with kids? You’ve come to the right place for inspiration. Here we share our personal reviews and itineraries for global travel adventures!
We’re a UK family that have been travelling with our two boys ever since they were born; from living in India for a year, trekking the Himalayas, to 101 days traversing Africa in a Land Rover. In 2022, we deregistered our boys (age 7 and 8) from school to travel Morocco for 4 months, and in 2023 we are deregistering them again to spend 10 weeks backpacking Southeast Asia.
TraveLynn Family was established in 2016 and has grown to be one of the top UK family travel blogs in the UK, receiving over 80k page views per month to this website and with an engaged following of over 20k on Instagram.
We have always believed that travel should not wait until the kids are older; and I think the pandemic has taught us that anything can happen to turn our lives up-side-down! We’re sure pleased we didn’t wait until our boys are the ‘perfect age’; whatever that age actually is.
The pandemic changed the way we travel, or maybe it’s a sign of us parents getting older (?), but we have learned to embrace slow travel as a family. Rather than jumping from one place to another to cram as much as possible in, we are happy to spend weeks (and 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.
In June 2020, we embraced family #vanlife and purchased a Mazda Bongo 4×4 camper on eBay. Since then, we have travelled in our Bongo almost every school holidays (which is a good 15 weeks here in the UK), always favouring the Dover ferry crossing over to the continent for our fix of sunshine, culture, and a nice stock up of wine. Our 6 weeks road tripping France in the summer of 2021 was an absolute dream.
As the world started to open up again, 2022 brought us a long-term travel adventure that was long overdue, although unfortunately the Bongo couldn’t join us due to maritime border restrictions at the time. We deregistered the boys from school to spend four months in Morocco. Being of schooling age, we chose to keep up with our boys’ formal schooling of Maths and English through online schooling (the education of travel fills in and expands all the other ‘gaps’). You can read about our online schooling journey for family travel here; we’re all about outsourcing for help rather than trying to manage ‘homeschooling’ ourselves.
2023 brings a new adventure and we are deregistering the boys from school again to spend 10 weeks backpacking Southeast Asia. It’s a region we used to regularly travel to, but it’s been over five years since our last visit. After the success of online learning last year, the boys will be taking it on again, and this time, Jay (Dad) is taking parental leave this time (which means no work for him!).
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