This year, Jen Keene-Crouse and her wife were planning to travel from their home in New Hampshire to Iceland and San Diego.
Like so many other families, they had to cancel their trips because of the coronavirus pandemic. But unlike other travelers, they’ve been making the most of the crisis. Along with working full-time for the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Jen and her wife have been packing in frequent mini-trips around the Northeastern U.S.
“If we can get there in a car, we’ve probably been there,” laughs Jen. “We’re blaming it on the kids, but it’s actually about our sanity. I can’t sit in my house anymore.”
The family has taken about a trip a week this summer with their 8- and 3-year-old. All of their adventures are socially distanced, simple and (usually) low-stress.
“It’s not all peaches and cream—there’s a lot of piss and vinegar, too,” she says. “But we’ve got some really cool pictures. We even made a 100 days of quarantine album.”
Chatting with Jen inspired me to get our family out of the house and on the road this summer. Maybe it will encourage you to plan—or not plan—your own impromptu adventure, too.
I recently led a workshop on…
gratitude and self-care. I have students turn off their phones and find someone they’re grateful for. They turn their phones back on and text that person, and then we sit there for 60 seconds and wait for the replies to come in. A lot of them are like, Are you OK? It’s an indication that we don’t express gratitude enough.
The longest we’ll drive for a day trip…
is probably four or five hours. We get up super-early and have no expectations of the kids having a normal sleep schedule. We recently went to Provincetown, Mass., one of our favorite places. It’s a 3 ½-hour drive if there’s not traffic. We got up at 6 and were there by 9 or 10 and planted ourselves in an area where we knew we’d have no people around. We had beach pizza, we watched the sunset, we counted the stars and got home at 1 in the morning.
Wherever we go we’re…
outside. Everyone’s got their own comfort levels, but we’re not eating at restaurants, we’re not doing take-out. We find places without people. We do summit hikes with a backpack or we’ll do trail hikes with the kids. We go to a place that’s isolated on the beach. And then obviously we’re wearing masks. It’s not fun to wear them in 100 degrees.
Sometimes we don’t…
tell our kids we’re going to take a trip. We’re like, I already packed your bag, get in the car. Other times there’s an inkling of something we know they like. They love the beach, they love hiking. It’s less about where they’re going. We tell them we’ll get pizza, we’ll get ice cream.
One of our road trip secrets…
is my wife’s idea, and it’s pretty great. We have these boxes, like for tackle or embroidery floss. My kids each take one of those the night before a trip and ransack the snack cabinet. I watch them sometimes and think, God, if I could find joy in simple things like that—putting 10 goldfish in a compartment! They get to eat it in the car, and they can’t fight because they each have one and they chose everything in it.
I think the key to simple travel with kids is…
just lowering expectations. My wife taught me that. So they’re not going to go to bed at their normal bedtime, they’re not going to eat the normal healthy food. They’re going to be crabby the next day and it’s fine. Sometimes the weather is changing or the kids are having an epic meltdown or I’m the crabby one and instead of where we’re planning to go I’ll say, why don’t we just stop here? Those spontaneous days end up being the best ones.
My wife and I each travel…
without our family once in a while. I’m more into adventure travel. I want to ride a horse through the tropics. She’s more, sit by the pool and let someone serve her a cocktail. We encourage that independence with each other.
We’re not big on…
electronics, so our kids don’t get an iPad in the car. We don’t have TVs mounted on the seats. It’s like, let’s name animals that start with A. Lets count all the red cars. It’s a throwback to my childhood in the 80s.
I am obsessed with…
using Pinterest to plan our travels. You hit one thing you like and it suggests something else. I have all these hidden boards of trips I want to take.
Some good advice I read was…
don’t just take pictures of your kids. Take pictures of your kids with your partner, with you. When they get older they’re not going to want to look at themselves, they’re going to want to look at you.
I’m hoping to get from The Expedition…
things that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I want to learn about different places. I only know what I know, and the way I search for things, and my circle of people.
I’d like to give…
my own experience. Or just philosophy and values. I like to push myself to push others, which ends up pushing me, too.
