Eat Gelato Every Day
Family travel is the best travel.
I love traveling with my husband and kids and am fortunate that the three of them also love to travel. We have driven miles and miles with our two kids over the years, but this past spring was the first time we took them out of the country. Since we met almost 15 years ago we have been talking about taking a trip to Italy. I spent my junior year of college in Bologna and have been hoping to share the amazing country with them. We even got the kids passports 4 years ago. However, things just always got in the way and it never happened. That is…until I found super cheap plane tickets and bought them on a whim. On Christmas morning, they found out that they would be spending spring break in Italy.
I had so much fun planning our 10 days and it was a fantastic trip (I will share more information about our itinerary in a later blog post). There are so many moving parts when you are traveling but things went very smoothly; we had amazing weather and no plane or train delays! Most importantly, both my daughter and son had blast, learned a ton, and were great travelers. We had three simple rules that helped make our trip such a fun and memorable experience: only take what you can carry on your back, try new things, and eat gelato every day.
1. Only Take What You Can Carry on Your Back
Since we were going to be visiting multiple cities and changing locations several times over the course of the week, we decided that we would each only take a backpack. This made sense to us for several reasons. First, we would not have to pay for checked bags or risk our bags not making it to our final destination. We would only be in Rome for 2 nights, so if our bags didn’t make it, we could potentially have to leave for our next stop without them. Second, we were planning to travel by train once in Italy and walk from the train stations to where we were staying. It is not easy to roll suitcases on old cobblestone streets or carry them up to a high floor in a building that doesn’t have an elevator. The kids used this 35 liter Osprey pack and it was perfect. It had plenty of room for everything they would need without being too heavy. They never complained about wearing it! I also used an Osprey and Jay carried his older Kelty backpack (unfortunately my favorite Kelty pack from college was falling apart so I had to invest in a new one).
We each packed light, taking things to layer in case of temperature changes, and used some packing cubes to make it easier to access everything when landing in a new location. However, the biggest space saver was our decision to only take one pair of shoes each. It is amazing how much room shoes take up! We weren’t planning to go anywhere fancy, so we traveled with the athletic shoes we had on our feet. At the end of the trip, we all agreed that backpacks were the way to go and even identified items we would leave at home the next time we traveled.
2. Try New Things
Before we arrived in Italy, we talked to our kids about taking risks and trying new things. While many things fall into this category, we really saw this rule play out with food. We did several tours and experiences that involved food, and they were great about trying things they would usually skip. We took a tour of an organic vineyard in Tuscany and ate lunch at the owner’s house. While pate and cured meats aren’t usually something my family eats, they rolled with it. We visited a goat farm and watched them making all varieties of goat cheese. Afterward we sat down for a tasting. Having just been in the room with the pungent smell of raw goat’s milk made the cheese a little less appetizing to my kids. However, they still tried most of it and had a great time playing with the baby goats. At restaurants, we all tried to order something different so we could share. We even kept a score of who “won” the most meals. To win at this game, you had to be the person who ordered the best food. We would all try everyone’s meals and then vote on who had the best. This was fun since we are a competitive family when it comes to games, and the bonus was that the kids tried everything we ordered. We will definitely continue this restaurant game the next time we travel.
3. Eat Gelato Every Day
This simple rule inspired a fun daily challenge: to find the best gelato place in whatever town or city we were in. While dessert every day is not the usual around our house, we thought it would be an easy thing to say “yes” to. Gelato is everywhere in Italy, and we anticipated the kids asking us to stop for some all the time. Instead of hearing them ask over and over and having to say “no” many times, we began the trip with the rule that they would be trying gelato each day. It stopped them from asking for it every time we passed a gelateria, and they had fun deciding where to stop each day. They became quite the gelato connoisseurs and can still recount each flavor they tried and their very favorites. Also, since we were walking miles in each city and it was warm outside, it was a great way to take a break and cool off, often with a fabulous view of a duomo or piazza.
In the end, these three “rules” helped our family have a wonderful time, and we hope to take many more family trips!