The Family · 3 min read

On travel, children, and what happens when you show them how big the world actually is.

It didn’t start with Paris.

It started the way most things do — close to home, with modest ambitions and a car packed for a beach day. Day trips down to the coast. A long weekend in Savannah. Charleston in the spring. Atlanta. New Orleans. A flight to New York when our oldest was seven to see a Harry Potter orchestra performance at Radio City Music Hall, which felt at the time like the most exciting thing we had ever done.

None of it was glamorous. All of it mattered.

We have five children now, ranging from baby to teenager. Our oldest has been traveling since she was small enough to fall asleep in a carrier on a cobblestone street. Our youngest is nine months old and already has her first trip behind her. Somewhere in between there are three more — each of them shaped, in ways we are still discovering, by the fact that we have always kept moving.

This was a choice. It remains one.

We believe — genuinely, not as a lifestyle position — that travel is one of the most important things you can give a child.

Not because of the photographs. Not because of the passport stamps or the hotel points or the carefully curated itinerary. But because of what happens to a child when they encounter a world that is genuinely different from the one they were born into. Different food on the table. Different language in the street. Different way of marking a Sunday or greeting a stranger or organizing a city block.

When you stay in one place your whole life, it’s easy to become jaded. Disenchanted. The world shrinks to the size of what you already know, and what you already know starts to feel like all there is. Travel interrupts that. It shows children — viscerally, undeniably — how large the world actually is. How many ways there are to live in it.

It is, in the most literal sense, a firsthand lesson in anthropology. It makes humanity more tangible.

We watched it happen with our oldest. We watched her become curious in a way that classroom learning alone never quite produced. We watched her ask questions she wouldn’t have known to ask if she hadn’t stood in front of something that demanded them. We watched her become, over years of beach trips and road trips and eventually transatlantic flights, a person who is genuinely interested in the world — not as a backdrop for her own life, but as something worth understanding.

That is what we are trying to give all five of them.

The trips got bigger over time. New York became Paris. Paris became London. London became the beginning of a longer list we are still writing. But the philosophy behind them hasn’t changed since we were packing a cooler for a day at the beach with a seven-year-old who wanted to know everything about everything.

We go because the world is worth seeing. We bring our children because we want them to know that early — before the world has a chance to feel small.

That’s what Seven Well Traveled is.

A record of where we go and how we do it. The stays worth the splurge and the ones that weren’t. The destinations that work with children who range from baby to teenager. The meals, the museums, the long drives, the moments that don’t make it into any photograph but stay with you anyway.

We started with beach days and a car full of kids. We’re still doing exactly that — just with more miles behind us and a longer list ahead.

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.