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People often ask me how I became such an evangelist for traveling with my family, and how those experiences landed me here, with you, on this blog. Sean and I have been married for 15 years. We met in San Francisco, dated for one year and were married in Napa Valley 7 months later.  We honeymooned in New Zealand and Australia.  We lived in the Bay Area until 2004 when a job took us to Sacramento.  We had two beautiful children.  Braeden, our son, was born in March 2005. Our daughter Raegan was born in January 2007.

In 2010 we moved to Switzerland for work, providing a whole new level of access to exciting places to explore.

Switzerland would become a home the kids would now remember growing up in more than their own.  A place they would assimilate. We all loved it, making friends that will last a lifetime. Today we consider ourselves having two places we call home: Northern California and Basel, Switzerland.

While we traveled a fair amount before moving, Europe was a catalyst for expanding our deep love for travel as a family.

To date, we have traveled to 47 countries and counting. Travel is no longer a hobby; it’s a real and felt-sensed ritual. View from our apartment in Basel, Switzerland

Returning to California in the summer of 2014, I didn’t want to forget a moment—and the significance of each moment as I understood them be in this one. Kids first winter in Switzerland, March 2010

Traveling as a family has not been a means to an end but a series of spontaneous and meaningful moments that have shaped us individually and as a family. It is through travel that we experience the world—our inner world and the worlds of others.

And perhaps more importantly in today’s hurried world—at no other time  are we more focused on each other and on us as a family.

So in December 2014, I began to capture these moments. To write them has become a personal practice of mindfulness—a way to remind me of each precious moment and to celebrate life’s journey.

What are the reasons parents don’t travel with kids?

Many people hold beliefs that traveling with kids is difficult, exhausting, and not worth the time or effort—validated further by our own bad experiences with our parents or a failed first attempt with our own kids.  These reasons are often focused on concerns about safety, unpredictability and personal discomfort. People feel anxious, helpless, and fearful.

Over the last 10 years, as part of my own journey as a parent and a traveler, these are the challenges and beliefs I have been seeking to understand: to explore more than answer, to discover more than judge. Each question is unique and worthy of our attention.

While the final imprints of these moments on my own kids might still be unseen, I offer with these writings a wish. A wish that our Travel Moments With Kids might inspire your own Travel Moments With Kids, expanding the borders and colors of your lives as a family and as individuals in this world—a world in which we are all ultimately striving to be happy, healthy, developing people and generations who leave this life having lived on purpose.