Yes, all our trips centered around kids. My parents dragged us on their trips never thinking of our needs or wishes and it sucked. I hated traveling with them. Thankfully normally they'd dump us on my grandparents which was much better.

Your kid is a toddler, for them a trip to the grocery store is adventurous.

But yes, at some point, they may be interested in adventure parks (not necessarily Disney, there are lots of nice ones Hershey, Busch gardens etc) but also you’d modify activities during trips to make it more fun for your 6 or 10 or 15 year old. There are so many art museums or archeological sites a 10 year old can visit in a 1 week trip. So you mix up those with stuff that they find fun.

Kid specific trips? no. Kid specific activities on a trip, of course we do that. I can't think of a single destination that I'd want to go to as an adult where we couldn't find something each day that our kids were excited about. They're in ES, so I realize things may get harder when they're teens and just hanging out with us is a punishment.

Anonymous wrote:What I'm getting from this is that you want us to think you are cool for taking a toddler to Joshua Tree???

No. I feel really weird and gross now knowing that our friends are judging us for it. It just never occurred to me go to Disney. It wasn't something I cared about. I thought parents who took their kids places like this 1) went with older kids and 2) went because THEY really wanted to go and needed an excuse.

Vacations, no. But we have done quick trips to Orlando when the weather was cold here. A day at most at a park and then just relaxing a a resort, pool, spa, some shopping.

Anonymous wrote:HA! You have just one 16 month old? Just wait until you have a 5-10yo and/or 2+ kids.

No, they're in middle school and high school now. We just always took them on active trips, and no one ever really complained.

Yep! I have trips planned for my kids' ages. Disney sorts of trips for preschool, early elementary ages. National Parks for middle school ages. Europe's greatest hits for high school aged.

Of course we go on lots of trips, but that's my general format. High schoolers don't want to be on Disney Cruises and a toddler doesn't want to be touring the Hermitage museum. There's a season in life to everything.

Anonymous wrote:What I'm getting from this is that you want us to think you are cool for taking a toddler to Joshua Tree???

Cooler than you suckers who take your 10 year old to Disney.

We don't pick heavily kid centric big vacations and have never done disney, but we have done kid centric weekend trips to places like Hershey park or Great Wolf Lodge.

What I'm getting from this is that you want us to think you are cool for taking a toddler to Joshua Tree???

When our kids were toddler or preschoolers? No. We went where we wanted to go that was also convenient and relaxing - i.e. we didn’t have to jump through hoops to make the logistics of bringing kids work.

Now that my kids are in elementary - absolutely! They learn about all kinds of things in school - geography, geology, Virginia history, world cultures, ancient civilizations - and they ask about vacations based on those things. We plan our vacations by combining trips my husband and I remember fondly from when we were kids and things the kids ask to do.

We find stuff to do that interests our kid wherever we go. It wouldn’t occur to me to go somewhere that we couldn’t bring our kid, because we don’t have childcare for something like that. So while our vacations aren’t kid-centric, they are kid-friendly.

Everyone’s kids are different, so kid-friendly to my family might be awful for someone else. But that applies to pretty much everything.

HA! You have just one 16 month old? Just wait until you have a 5-10yo and/or 2+ kids.

Anonymous wrote:It never occurred to us to plan trips around our kids - we always just went where we wanted, and took the kids along. I guess it helped that we were never into hardcore third world adventuring or luxury no-children-allowed resorts, but some of our friends act shocked that we took a portable toddler to, say, Joshua Tree in February instead of - well, I'm not sure what kind of vacation a 16-month-old would prefer. Is this kind of thing really that out there?

We do, for both our sake and our kids' happiness.

Informed by my childhood experience: I was dragged all over Europe as an 8 YO by church, museum & art-obsessed parents.

The effect?

I've traveled extensively as an adult, but have never and likely will never return to Europe (except perhaps Norway/Sweden or eastern Europe).

So we try to balance our interests with our kids.

B/c we don't want to "ruin" places for them and, frankly, if they're not enjoying themselves, then we probably won't either.

Of course they do...look at all the people who go to Disney year after year

We have always done vacations based on where we want to go, but do take our kids ages into consideration and include activities that they can do and enjoy. We visited Arches NP when our kids were little because it's a place where you can see a lot doing relatively short hikes. My son was 4 when we went and did the delicate arch hike which is only 3 miles round trip. As they got older we chose different national park trips that have included some pretty tough hikes and have done a few hike where our kids were the only ones out there. We have also done things like going to Olympic NP followed by a few days in Seattle where we did kid centric things like visiting the zoo.

I wouldn't take toddlers on an art museum tour of Europe, but that is also not my thing. We've never done Disney with our kids.