Tips for Successful Family Adventures

Family Adventures is a practical guide to involving babies and children in all sorts of adventures, whether it be cycling, camping, paddling, hiking, swimming or outdoor holidays.

As soon as Bex Band, founder of the UK’s largest women’s adventure community, Love Her Wild, announced she was pregnant with her first child, the sympathy began. ‘Enjoy your adventures while you can’, ‘It’s going to be a big shock not being able to travel as much’, and ‘Aren’t you going to miss adventuring?’It seemed as though having children was a death sentence when you’re an outdoor adventurer.

But it really doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, it’s a scary prospect – how do you keep them safe? Where do they sleep? What equipment do you need? – but it’s totally doable.

This guide is full of useful information (such as what to pack when camping with an infant or how to keep children safe in open water), invaluable tips (family games you can play around a campfire or how to keep morale up in bad weather) and plenty of honesty around things going wrong (poo-explosion on a wild camp, anyone?). Experiences from adventuring families also provide a plethora of insights so that you’re well equipped to make your family adventuring dreams a reality.

Here, Bex Band offers some tips for successful family adventures:

Adventuring with children is very different from when you are managing a trip with just adults. Packing, logistics, managing distances and food intake – it’s all different. It took us a while to get the balance right and to realise where the struggles would come from and what to let go of.

Continue reading Tips for Successful Family Adventures

An Extract from Soundings

An extract from Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales by Doreen Cunningham.

Travelling the grey whale highway

The train ride is a beauty. We shoot out of the station in our capsule, in glorious limbo, past the Wun Fun meat company buildings and a viaduct. Max and I stare out the window, transfixed. Muddy brown snake of river and yellow conveyor- belt- plant flash past. Glittering heaps and in the distance mountains. I can feel the landscape filling my head. This is how my heart is furnished, like the view from a train. I like to be totally occupied in the immediate. And am always, always, longing for something in the distance.

Continue reading An Extract from Soundings

Travelling with Children: Stanfords Travel Writers Festival 2020

The prospect of travelling with children can be daunting: long flights, unfamiliar food, the absence of the home comforts and helpful grandparents. But more parents are venturing away from all-inclusive resorts with kids’ club entertainment on tap in favour of immersive real-world experiences. In doing so they discover the joys that family travel can bring, and the connections that children can open up around the world. Adrian Phillips talks to the ESTWA award winning writer Dom Tulett and Susannah Cery, founder of online family travel community Our Tribe Travels, to share their experiences of travelling with their children and tips on how to make it work.

Kidding Around: Tales of Travel with Children

Kidding Around: Tales of Travel with Children