A mother and her son Julian have spent his short life collecting trips most parents would file under 'absolutely not': ice fishing in Wisconsin at five weeks old, a 23-month-old road-tripping Oman's Wahiba Sands, an 88-day, 14-country, six-continent odyssey that raised every family alarm going. Her argument, and it's a convincing one, is that a hard trip is not the same thing as a bad trip.
The evidence is gloriously messy. At the Indy 500, when Julian was three, a diaper catastrophe of epic proportions left the family hunting children's clothes at a speedway merch stand. The only option: an $80 size XL Christmas sweater, cinched with a hair tie. His reaction to the screaming cars? A grin so big it turned 'Poopgate 2025' into family legend. The disasters, she notes, age remarkably well — the horror of the moment becomes the story everyone asks about.
Mardi Gras with a preschooler sounded reckless, but most of the festivities turned out to be firmly family territory. Watching parades from the elevated stands at the Sheraton New Orleans (with Club Lounge bathrooms and snacks on tap), Julian collected footballs, stuffed animals and light-up swords from krewe members, developing a rapid 'reach-and-duck' technique. The real hazard wasn't Bourbon Street bedlam — it was beads to the face. Outside the Toulouse Theatre, he was the only kid at a Fat Tuesday street party, and nobody minded. Locals loved that he was having as much fun as they were.
Alaska was the sternest test. Anchorage's Fur Rondy winter festival went swimmingly — midway rides, a Running of the Reindeer featuring adults in inflatable dinosaur suits — before Fairbanks delivered a humbling -38°F, a coughing kid, and a day lost to an iPad. Then came the payoff: a snow machine loop on a frozen lake (bundled up behind his mum, yelling 'Faster, Mama!'), and a helicopter flight with lodge owner Mark Fleenor over the Matanuska Glacier. Julian stood inside an electric-blue ice cave, loaded a chunk of glacier aboard, and flew home with his own personal iceberg. A blizzard stranding them for 48 extra hours didn't dent the memory.
The latest instalment — two and a half weeks across South Africa and Madagascar, arranged with Stanley Safaris — showed the payoff of four years of saying yes. At Tswalu Loapi in the Kalahari he joined cheetah and rhino game drives; off Madagascar he hiked Lokobe National Park, unbothered by lemurs, frogs and a boa coiled on the trail.
The takeaway for travelling parents isn't 'take your four-year-old to a sub-zero Fairbanks'. It's that most parental hesitation is anticipatory — a knee-jerk no built from worst-case scenarios. Kids get sick, tantrums happen abroad just like at home, plans implode. None of it automatically ruins a trip, and post-travel amnesia has a way of keeping the highlights while the low points become the stories you retell. The trip you keep dismissing as too hard might be the one worth booking.