Everything is better when we stick together

Traveling with children is, at best, treated like some kind of niche interest.  Some guide books give you a little box on a page if you're lucky ("Perth For Children"), recommending you leave the cool stuff to everyone else and find the ubiquitous Science Museum.  This is the same accommodation they'll offer a few pages later for folks who are particularly interested in microbreweries ("Getting Crafty!") or those who are particularly into eco-tourism.  At worst, you stumble across blogs and news articles about the horrors experienced by those who were forced to interact with a child on their vacation.  The humanity.

I'm not here to take umbrage with either of those views, really:  I feel super lucky to be able to travel to amazing places with my children.  Not much more than a year ago, my brother-in-law and his wife returned from an amazing trip around Asia, and I remember thinking, not even regretfully, really, that I wasn't sure I'd ever travel to that side of the world, since it's so far from the United States and it can be so costly to get there.  Yet now here we are, settled in Singapore for a few years, with abundant opportunities to pop in to countries I've only read about.  Every time we plan a trip, I look for information about where my kids might want to go in our latest destination, and almost every time, I scrape up a few overviews of the whole city with few specifics and a recommendation or two for a sad rollercoaster outside of town.

I haven't found what I'm looking for, yet, so I'm going to write it.  I suspect that there's not a huge market for travel guides for families, due in part to the cost of traveling with lots of extra people, and I get that, but I think there are other people out there like me who are interested in the art and culture and history of places they've never been who ALSO enjoy the company of their children and want to share the experience of travel with them.  Walking through really old places and thinking about the people who built them  is one of my very favorite things, you guys, and it's not an exaggeration to say it was a highlight of my life to see my son walking around in a similar reverie recently in Vietnam.

Old stuff is the best.

This is my guide to some of the sights I've seen with my two children, aged 8 and 10, and stuff we learned there, including some of the non-chicken-nugget foods I'm able to trick or bribe them into eating (which they almost invariably like in spite of their prejudices).  I used to be a teacher, so I definitely suck all the fun out of every vacation by learning things and telling my children all about it, and I'm going to do that for you, too.

This is NOT, in any way, a comprehensive travel guide to entire cities or countries, though if someone would like to pay me to travel for a living and write about it, hit me up.   I'm not recommending any particular hotels or services, and none of my recommendations have been solicited or paid for.

I hope you find our adventures useful, either for planning your own trip, or for following along on a virtual vacation.