Travel can easily become a someday thing, a bucket list item that never gets checked off. If you’re going to travel in actuality, you’ve also got to prioritize family travel in your life, before you ever hit the road.
Are you saving money for a trip?
Are you figuring out how you’ll make time to go somewhere?
If you aren’t doing those things, it’s much harder to go where you want to go, when you want to go.
A hard truth about how to prioritize family travel
We’re going to share a little something that other people don’t want to talk about. It’s one of those things that isn’t glamorous:
When you say yes to something, you say no to other things. As much as we like to half-joke that when you’re given a choice, you take both, we also know that’s only somewhat true. Investing the time and resources to plan a trip and go is also time and resources that you won’t spend on other potential parts of your life.
The hard truth? You can’t have it all.
That hard truth comes with a spoonful of sugar
But a hard truth isn’t the same thing as unfortunate or discouraging. The other side of not having it all, is a wonderful truth: You don’t need to have it all. You just need to focus on the priorities that matter to you and your family.
For us, we prioritize family travel. Small travel, such as the occasional afternoon jaunt. But also big travel, such as how we’re about to embark on some full-time globetrotting.
We are giving up some things to do this. Some of that is small, such as having an easy supply of ice cream in the freezer, or an array of incredible content to stream. But it’s the big stuff that we’re the most aware of.
We’ll be away from friends and family we love, and we’re going to miss them like hell.
We’ll be away from our home, and that’s never easy for hobbits like us.
We love the Northwest, and it’s not easy to leave.
Yet we also know what we’ll gain.
We’ll gain incredible memories and experiences in other places and with other cultures.
We’ll replenish, and grow, our sense of wonder.
Our kids will directly see just how big and broad the world is, and how wonderful that is. We people can do so many things so many different ways yet still for the same shared purpose. We’ve always seen that as a strength of our common humanity.
Why we prioritize family travel
Anytime we make a choice in life, we say yes to something and say no to something else.
That’s okay.
We are finite. We do have only but so much time, energy, and other resources.
That’s also the beauty of what we deliberately choose to do, such as prioritizing family travel. We can decide, and align ourselves to our choice. We can say, shout, and sing that full, heartfelt yes. When we move toward it, and make it real, our ability to make our dreams come true is powerful, fulfilling, and the stuff that the best memories of our lives is made of.
