We used to think traveling as a family was supposed to feel magical. Everyone tells you that traveling with your child is how you “make memories,” how you “give them the world,” how you “soak up every moment while they’re little.”

But the truth?

Most of the time, it didn’t feel magical at all. It felt overwhelming.
We’d pack for days, stress about the car ride, worry about naps, snacks, moods, timing, weather, and all the little things that never seem to go as planned.

And somewhere along the way, we noticed we weren’t actually living the moments we were trying so hard to create.

We were surviving them.
Going through the motions.
Trying to keep everything “under control” enough to count as a good memory.

And then one day, honestly, in the middle of yet another frantic travel morning, we had a lightbulb moment.
We looked at each other and realized:

This isn’t the way we want to travel as a family.
This isn’t the way we want our son to remember these years.
And it doesn’t have to feel this way.

That realization changed everything for us.

Because travel wasn’t the problem.
The pressure was.

We didn’t fully see it happening at first. It was slow, messy counters turning into messy rooms, tiny piles turning into big ones, quick chores becoming full-day projects. We kept telling ourselves, “It’s just a busy week.” Except the “busy week” never ended.

One night, after stepping over the same stack of laundry for the third day in a row and realizing our son was tugging at our arm asking, “Can we play now?”, something inside us cracked a little. We weren’t ignoring him on purpose… we were buried.

Buried in clutter.
Buried in chores.
Buried in guilt.

That was our light-bulb moment.

We looked around our home, our safe place, our family nest, and realized we weren’t living in it anymore. We were just managing it. Our home wasn’t supporting our family… we were spending every spare minute trying to survive it.

And in that moment, we decided something had to change.

There was a season where our days felt more like passing each other in the same house than truly living together. We weren’t fighting, but we weren’t really connecting either. Our conversations circled around schedules, bills, and chores. Our laughter had become quiet, and even though we were together, we both felt a deep loneliness that neither of us wanted to admit.

One night after our son went to bed, we both sat on the couch scrolling through our phones in silence. I remember looking over at him and realizing how long it had been since we really saw each other. That was the light bulb moment, something had changed, and not in a small way. We had become roommates instead of partners.

We didn’t know where to start, but we knew that something had to shift. So we made a decision to step out of our routine, literally. We decided to take a weekend trip, just the three of us. No schedules. No housework. No expectations. Just time away to see what happened when we got out of our bubble.