Traveling vs. Vacation

We’ve hinted at this concept of vacation vs. traveling, so let’s get into it.

Vacations and traveling are two very different things. My family is lucky to be able to do both; and both are important for families for different reasons. Vacations are a relaxing (or as relaxing as you can get with small children) break from your normal routine. They are more of your “lay on a beach, no cares, no cooking, everything is EASY,” type of deal. Vacation is an all-inclusive resort or spa, or a cruise ship, where a majority of the essentials (lodging/food/basic itinerary) are taken care of for you. It can also be a quick weekend to a hotel near a winery or mountain town, where you can decompress, maybe hike or ski, and eat good food.

Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? My family tries to do one or two of these trips every year. For us, they are short – 3 or 4 nights. Sometimes it’s Mexico where we lay on the beach, eat good food, and relax. Perfect break from our routines, work, and rules. Before kids we occasionally stayed in all-inclusive resorts. Now we rent a small bungalow on the beach, and it’s perfect. We also try to go to our favorite Colorado mountain town, stay in our favorite hotel (the off-season is the only time we can afford it!), swim in the pool, enjoy the scenery, and eat ourselves silly at the monstrous hotel breakfast buffet (really, it’s that good).

These are vacations. Ok, so some parents say any trip with young kids is NOT a vacation, but that’s probably for a different post. Let’s refocus.  Now that we have vacations covered, what do we mean by traveling?

Traveling is something my now husband (16 years and counting) and I have done together for over fifteen years. Traveling is living in another place, sometimes for just a week or ten days, sometimes for several weeks or even a month. It means renting an apartment, villa, or house (or, in our case, even a tent). For us, it usually means off-the-beaten-path Europe. You get to know a place. You shop in local stores. You get into a regular groove and routine. You cook. You do laundry. You find delicious neighborhood restaurants. You visit as many interesting historical and cultural sites as you can handle. Traveling is rewarding and amazing. Getting to really know a new place is a reward in itself.

It can also be stressful, trying, and messy. You must navigate and figure out the language, because you are likely not in a huge tourist area and are probably traveling outside the regular tourist season. You accidentally order something disgusting in a restaurant in Lake Ohrid because no one speaks English, your Macedonian is terrible, and the only translation says it is called Grandma’s Pan (I should have known better). You must take time out of your week to do laundry, because you physically cannot pack enough clothes for every day while you travel. You learn to pack a clothesline, clothespins, and detergent. You become an expert in sink laundry. You don’t pack the cutest outfits your kids own and definitely don’t worry about matching, because they will get stained, and odds are a bird will poop on your drying laundry at least once on this trip. I completely understand that this isn't for everyone, but it is for us. Skimming the surface of new places is not for us – jumping into the mayhem is for us.

Yes, it’s messy, but it’s also wonderful. I’ll be honest – it’s not always easy, especially when your kids are little and tottering around. But we do it. Because it’s so worth it.

Laundry with a view, Amalfi

You will come to know this about us, but we have spent a great deal of time in Italy. I have taken students there three times and our family many – we have spent more than six months there in total. Even with all that time, I still feel like we are scratching the surface of this amazing country.  We don’t vacation here, we travel.

The time I took students, we took our two children (2 and 5 at the time) and our trip was five weeks long. My husband spent the days with the kids while I was with the students. This experience was extremely rewarding but also completely exhausting (did I mention I had major surgery one week before we left and couldn’t lift more than 20 lbs for 3 weeks?). The remaining three weeks included some early downtime in Vernazza, then two weeks in Sardinia. Traveling that time included: exploring a completely new place - Sardinia; adjusting on the fly at 11 pm when the apartment in the old town did not in fact have parking; dealing with a full-scale 2 year old meltdown in a grocery store; locating and decoding a Florentine pharmacy when a bug bite turned dangerous; cooking usually two meals a day; exploring and seeing so many new sites, often when the little one would say “I thought I told you I didn’t want to see another church!”; figuring out driving in an ancient; keeping two kids busy and entertained; exploring new restaurants and deciphering menus in Sardinian; and amazing beach time. Just thinking back to that time makes me tired, but it truly epitomizes traveling.

Sardinian Beach Time

Traveling is getting to know a place. It’s finding a good neighborhood restaurant and returning. It’s figuring out how to buy fruit at the local market. It’s walking the streets, learning to drive through the countryside, and figuring out the local transportation. It’s seeing familiar faces at the local boulangerie. It’s making a personal connection with the family or amazing single woman who owns your apartment. It’s waking up to the street sounds of a foreign place. It’s smelling the burning of grape vines in the early morning hours. It’s seeing an abandoned castle on the hill across the valley and driving to it, spending twilight hours exploring, all alone. It’s going to an out-of-the-way neighborhood restaurant and making new friends and sharing a glass of wine. It’s having an itinerary, then throwing it out the window, deciding to stay four extra days in an apartment in Croatia, because you can.

Now, you may have questions. The most common is: Is this way of traveling expensive? It can be, depending on what you do, but most often it’s cheaper than an all-inclusive resort and we’ve priced it to be cheaper than a week at Disney. Buy groceries (markets are great places to learn about a place) and cook a few meals at your apartment, stay away from overpriced tourist restaurants, stay in apartments outside city centers or forego the really expensive one, and be open to flying economy, and you can do this.

Now, is traveling for everyone? Nope and that is ok. Many families only have enough vacation days with mom or dad’s job to take one short trip per year. I get that – we deal with that in our family (my husband saved up for two years to do the long trip I mentioned earlier). With limited days, families choose a vacation with sun, sand, and surf. They want to RELAX – they don’t much care about cultural immersion and definitely don’t want to cook on their days off. That works for them. What I argue is that both approaches are important for families, especially children. Exposing your children to other cultures, languages, foods, ways of doing things is beyond important. They must adapt to new routines; they are outside their comfort zone. They absolutely must try and eat new food. They learn history where it happened. They become citizens of the world, with their eyes open to new experiences, with an inherent love and acceptance of people. It makes them resilient, and they appreciate home just a little bit more.

If you’re considering something like this, I say DO IT! If you have questions (or need help), let me know. In the meantime, where have you traveled with kids? What did you learn? What didn’t work? What was amazing?