“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 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 10) and Ezra (age 8). We’re from the UK, but just about to move to 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:
- living in India for a year
- trekking the Himalayas
- 101 days traversing Africa in a Land Rover
- a full summer of Bongo vanlife in France
- slow travelling and living in Morocco for 4 months
- 10 weeks backpacking Southeast Asia
But whilst we love off-the-beaten-track adventures, we also love exploring Europe on our doorstep, be it road tripping in our Bongo camper or a short European city break.
TraveLynn Family was established in 2016 and has grown to be one of the top family travel blogs in the UK, receiving over 85k page views per month to this website and with an engaged following of over 23k on Instagram.
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 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 school, creating remote work, and of course, learning the tricks and rewards of budget family travel… we’ve learned to be quite creative!
With the boys now of schooling age and based in the UK’s Peak District we make the most of the 14 weeks of school holidays in the UK, but we also take the boys out of school to travel 4-5 months at a time and embrace the philosophy of worldschooling.
Do we homeschool when we travel? Oh no. Lockdowns sucked any ability we ever had to homeschool our kids. Online learning works brilliantly for us! You can read about our approach to online schooling here.
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.
Our current travel plans
2023 was quite a year for travel, with our main adventure being the 10 weeks backpacking Southeast Asia (which included Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore). For this, the boys were deregistered from school and Jay took unpaid parental leave.
Click here for our full roundup of travel in 2023.
And as for 2024? Well so far there have been trips to Essaouira, Morocco, and Bucharest, Romania. And in April we’re moving to Penang, Malaysia! We’ve been granted digital nomad visas and found the boys a lovely school. We’re so excited about this new adventure!
Follow us on Instagram for regular updates of our travels.
OUR SOUTHEAST ASIA ITINERARY
Inspiration for how to travel as a family:
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 from the blog:
- How to take better family photos when travellingTravel creates the best memories for families, and the pressure can be on to capture the right moments. Want to take the stress out of getting the right photo? Then read on for our top …
- Bucharest with kids: your family travel guide (2024)Romania’s capital, Bucharest, is not your typical European city break with kids. Before our visit, we knew very little about it except for a vague link to Dracula. So why did we visit Bucharest with …
- Novotel Bucharest City Centre REVIEW: comfort and quality in BucharestShort European city trips with kids always need a little extra thought and planning. Wandering around a city, checking out museums, restaurants and waterparks can easily fill a whole day (and evening) but they can …
- APH Parking at Manchester Airport REVIEW: Park & Ride or Meet & Greet?Public transport in the Peak District is hit and miss, so getting from our home in Bakewell to Manchester Airport can be tricky. The fastest and most reliable option is to drive, so we therefore …
- Goa with kids: the best beaches in Goa for familyparents share the best beaches to visit in Goa with kids The palm-fringed beaches of Goa are an eclectic mix catering to the raver, the yogi, the package sun-seeker and everything in between. So it can be …
- Running on holiday: tips for keeping your training on trackYou may not have heard of him, but Ron Hill holds a fairly impressive unofficial world record – the longest running streak (i.e. running day after day with no break) for 52 years. When I …