The winter, spring and summer plans sound good. I personally can't swing this but many families in my daughter's class seem to do this annually.


Not sure where a fall trip would fit in.

Anonymous wrote:Agree it is a lot. There is no fall school break for one. Spring break is only a week, which makes international travel tough given the time constraints and price.

Winter break and summer vacations are going to be when your best trips can happen

+1. Once your child is in school, there's not enough vacation time to do that many trips, particularly if you want to do the holidays at home. It's also tiring and IMO constant travelling takes away from some of the novelty.

Agree it is a lot. There is no fall school break for one. Spring break is only a week, which makes international travel tough given the time constraints and price.

Winter break and summer vacations are going to be when your best trips can happen

OP, that sounds like a lot!

Our vacation planning didn’t stop when we had kids, so first trip with our oldest was 4 months and just went from there.

Typically aim for 1-2 ski vacations and 1-2 international trips a year depending upon schedules/happenings. We’re flexible.

Our kids are still young though so remains to be seen once we hit the upper grades.

Our tradition from when kids were babies until the oldest left elementary school was to jump on any cheap flight deals or hotel deals.
With kids in middle school and high school, and post Covid flight prices, this has sadly become a thing of the past. We used to go on two to three international trips a year that way.
Your fall trip might work until you have kids in MS, but then you can’t just pull them out of school anymore very easily. Spring break is very expensive to travel, so we’ve only done a few trips then seeing family and once got a great deal to Asia.
I would travel as much as you can with the kids until they are tweens/teens and then you’ll have to re evaluate how much time you will still have to travel.

I also think you aren't "obligated" to do all these types of vacations.

I think most people would say my family is very well traveled and my kids have been all over the country and world with us.

That said, we don't like everything. We don't take ski vacations - we tried skiing once as a family and didn't love it - it's expensive, it's cold and it involves a lot of equipment. I know some people love that, but we don't.

As my kids have gotten older, we try to take vacations that all of us enjoy - for us, that means no skiing and no camping.

My whole family likes hiking and outdoor activities, love water and related activities, likes sightseeing and international travel. We love the beach. We don't spend too much time or money on trips that we don't want to do.

We have two kids. One is in gymnastics and one plays basketball in soccer and we are busy. Pretty much year round four to six days a week either with practices, meat or games. They have small bits off from the sports during holiday breaks but even during the summer they have soccer and gymnastics.

We do a lot of them to miss occasionally for family trips but there is no way in hell we could be taking four to six week long trips or more a year, especially since they are both in school.... We both work from home so have the ability to work while on vacation if needed but our kids don't have that luxury with school

This is not at all realistic if you have more than one child, They are in any extra curricular activities, our schooled in a setting other than homeschool and if you and your partner both work.

Financially you may be able to do all of these but there is just not enough time to get all of that done. International trips take at least a week. As others have said, I have no idea how you're getting to all of these national parks unless you're flying there. Which kind of defeats the point a little bit of seeing different parts of the country. If you just want to fly to each of the 50 states hell you could do that in a month. But is that really the point of what you want?

Anonymous wrote:I'm up late thinking about yearly trips we want to attempt when DD is older.

What age did you start doing yearly vacations? What is your vacation schedule?

Winter- ski/winter resort/ holidays w family at home
Spring -camping/dude ranch type trip
Summer - beach/lake trip
Fall- road trip/ possibly checking off national parks

We would also love to do the 50 states w DD before HS graduation and take 2 intl trips a year- one splurge and one budget trip

Is this just too unrealistic?

How much vacation time do you get? That is a ton of time and money.