Travel with your parents. Now.

Getting to know your parents' younger selves through travel is a gift.

*let us bow our heads and pray that August comes up in here like it’s got some sense.*

Me trying to explain myself last month.

July, WTF. Before I get into this essay topic that I’m super excited to talk about, I just had to say that July was not kind to me. I’ve mentioned here before that i get seasonal depression during the summertime, and let me just say that last month was one of the worst I’ve had in a long time. The first two weeks of July were dicey to my mental health to say the least, and although I know I’m not a machine, I still feel like I want to acknowledge that you all haven’t heard from me in a little bit and offer a reason why. Here’s hoping that August will be much sweeter, and so far, so good.

Moving on. I never realized how much traveling with your parents as an adult was an anomaly before I started sharing on social media photos and videos of annual trips that I take with my Mom. We take at least one major trip a year, usually around one of our birthdays (or both!) and the trips span both domestic and international locales. She is legitimately one of my favorite travel partners, usually interested in the same types of activities I am: museums, theater shows, walking tours, and of course food. She (mostly) trusts my decisions to take part in activities that I find on the internet, like a secret garden rooftop restaurant in Vietnam that I found on google that I wanted to visit during our 2019 trip. She may have side-eyed me the entire time during our walk through a slightly sketchy alley and climb up three flights of dirty stairs to get there, but she was thrilled when we arrived to the darling space. Or there was the time in Rome where we made friends with a snappily dressed man in Vatican Square that I read about on the internet who scored us tickets to see the Papal mass when we were too late to score them the traditional way. She’s always down to have an adventure and I adore her for that.

Adventures with Mom L-R: Cooking class in Vietnam, beachside in Thailand, sunset in Florence, with our new friend in Vatican city, cowgirling in Montana, exploring Yellowstone geysers, dogsledding in Big Sky, my birthday trip to Mexico and Juneteenth in Martha's Vineyard

In the past, when I’ve considered our travels together, I’ve definitely felt lucky to have a Mom that I get along with well enough to travel with, but now that I’ve lost my father and am about to get married, I see our travels completely differently. My parents always brought me along with them on their travels when I was a child, but as I got older, I relished in traveling solo and getting to learn about who I am and what I’m made of through travel. I never considered the fact that my parents could have had the exact same experience with their own travels as young adults before I came on the scene. My Dad lived in France during his time in the military for nearly four years in the 1960s, and though he always talked about his experience glowingly, I never really understood how formative that must have been for him as a young Black military man from Montgomery, Alabama. We traveled to France when I was a child and teen, but I didn’t have the awareness that I have now as an adult as to how much that experience must have shaped how he saw the world and himself in it. Think about it, he was there at the same time as James Baldwin. A time when, if they had the ability to do so, Black people were leaving the United States for a sense of belonging in France that they didn’t have in their own country. How disorienting that must have been for him. I wonder how he was able to face coming back to the United States to be treated as a second-class citizen at best, in his own home country.

Daddy during his military days; on one of his trips to Paris with Momma; Dad and I on my first trip to France.

I always dreamed of going back to France with my Dad as an adult and we talked about it often, but the reality was that in my 20s, neither he nor I had the financial means to do so. It is one of my biggest regrets, even though there’s valid reasoning for why it never happened. I’ll never forget the moment when I was living in Madrid at age 27, walking down the street and I stopped in my tracks thinking “damn, Dad had pretty much this exact same experience of living in a foreign country at my age.” I called him in that moment and we talked about it. I was able to bask in his memories of that time in his life, but I still carry so much grief that I didn’t get the chance to relive those moments with him as an adult in the actual place. Through his dementia over the last few years of his life and his eventual passing, I feel like those memories are lost and that I’ll yearn the opportunity to know who my Daddy was as a young man for the rest of my life. For now, I’m grateful I get to hold on to the memories we made together through our travels when I was growing up, but it’s truly not the same.

The pain I feel over losing that opportunity with my Dad has completely reframed my opportunity with travel with my Mom. My Mom has LIVED, honey. I mean, both of my parents totally grabbed life with both hands and shook the hell out of it, but my Mom is the parent I have left to learn about and soak up life lessons from, especially during such a transitional period of my life. I want to know who she was as a young woman, how she developed a sense of self-confidence, and where her curiosity about the world came from as a young girl growing up in small-town southwest Louisiana. A few years ago, I learned that her love of travel came from a “life-changing” (her words) trip to Switzerland when she was 19 years old, in 1969.

Mom showing me her Switzerland album that's more than 50 years old, look how cute she is!! That afro!

Let me just pause right there so you can really understand the magnitude of this trip. My mother is from a town of less than 3,000 people. Her parents did not attend college and at that point had barely left the south, much less the country. She was the oldest of four and the first to attend college. Her sorority and hometown helped her raise the $1500 dollars (including airfare!) required to join an Experiment in International Living trip to Switzerland for two months where she traveled with other students (she was one of two Black students in the entire cohort) from across the U.S. throughout several cities in Switzerland, including a homestay. Whenever she talked about this trip, she told me again and again how much it changed her life and opened her world to a life beyond Louisiana. It was the spark of a love of travel that was passed down to me.

After several years of talking about it. I’m so EXCITED to share that next month, Mom and I will be taking our annual “big trip” to Switzerland to recreate as much of her original trip as we can over the span of one week. I can’t wait to experience a new-to-me country through her memories as a 19-year-old. Whenever I think about this trip for us, I am filled with overwhelming amounts of gratitude because I understand how rare it is to be able to do something like this with a parent. I’m especially excited to do this before I get married because I do get the sense that my Mom may wonder where she will fit into my life after marriage, and I want her to know that she will always remain a priority. So much so that I told her I’d rather take this trip together than have a bridal shower lol 😂

I can’t wait to share more about what we have planned for the trip and how it goes over the next few weeks. To be clear, for those of you reading this who feel like you’ll never be able to travel with your parents for whatever reason, please know that my Mom and I have had our travel challenges as well. I don’t want to make it seem like our travels together are always rainbows and butterflies. We’ve had to work through physical limitations, differences in opinion, her feeling like I was being too reckless in the activities that I wanted to do and me feeling like I didn't come all this way to sit in the hotel room or be treated like a child lol. It has taken lots and lots of communication, crying fits and patience for us to get to where we are now with our trips together, so if you feel like traveling with a parent may not be in the cards for you mentally or emotionally, trust me, I get it.

That said, have you either successfully or unsuccessfully taken a trip with a parent? I want to hear about it in the comments. If you have any Geneva, Zurich or Lucerne travel recs for us, please drop them in the comments as well.

Finally, I’m so happy to share that I was recently accepted as a ShopMy Curator, so now you all can shop my personal favorite travel products.* If you all want to know more about some of the tactics and products that have helped Mom and I to travel together relatively smoothly, I’d be happy to share more. Thanks, as always, for reading.

*Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase — at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I truly love or use myself.