Holly's Family • Sandy's Family • How This Site Began

Holly's Family
Most importantly I am a mother of two daughters and one son, and a wife to a husband with a demanding work schedule. I also love to travel . . . sometimes live to travel neither of which is financially or logistically easy with a family of five. I hope through this website to give other parents support and help in their efforts to make travel possible for their families.

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Sandy's Family

I grew up in California, and moved to Seattle, Washington at 13. After earning a BA degree, I worked for 7 years, mostly in the human resources field. I married at 27 and two years later became a full-time mom when our first child was born. Nearly four years later, our twin boys were born. Now, at 43, I work part time and volunteer at the kids' schools.

Our oldest son is now 14 and the twins, who are 10, still build and rebuild Lego cars, trains and other structures. We've now been to all the Legolands: United States, England, Germany, and Denmark. We like to travel to major cities, and always visit the science and history museums.

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An Invitation

My little sister was planning her wedding, to be held in England, in July, 2005. Of course, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity (great excuse?) to travel far away and be present at the wedding, and good thing, since I was the Matron-of-Honor.

My Travel Nature

Now, we are not world travelers – I am fairly high-strung and invariably end up sick to my stomach at least once whenever I travel. For my honeymoon in ‘92, my idea of a great vacation was to immobilize myself on a beach somewhere. My future-husband wanted to show me Europe. We went to Europe, but compromised, only changing hotels 3 times during the 2 week stay – my husband would have been quite happy to switch cities every day!

Now We Have Kids

Later, when we had kids, we planned to travel with them, but only after they were at an age where we felt they’d really appreciate the history and geography of a location, perhaps age 10. So, in 2005, since two of our boys were still under 10, they had been just to Mexico, Canada, Boston and a few neighboring states. But, suddenly we needed to get them to England. It didn’t quite fit our long-range travel ideas, but we (I) attacked the planning with enthusiasm!

Shocking!

First, the plane tickets. Searching in mid-winter, there were plenty of advertised deals from Seattle to London for around $400 each. Unfortunately, a mid-summer flight is 2 ½ times that amount. Then, we discovered that our accumulated 125,000 frequent flyer miles (gathered through a few years of exclusive airline-VISA use for all household purchases) couldn’t be used, as the airlines restrict the number of passengers per flight who can purchase tickets using miles, and apparently, those seats were sold long before our 5-month advance purchase. So, we had to pay about $1,000 each, for a direct, 9-hour flight from Seattle. There are flights for less, but might include a stop.

Planning Our Days in England

Flights handled, we looked to hotels. And for that, I had to know where we were going. I needed to do research, and lots of it. I ordered take the kids England and Eyewitness Travel Guides Great Britain. My mom got me Rick Steve’s Great Britain 2005. Then my husband bought London for Families and Best Day Trips from London. I read each one and took lots of notes. (See our book reviews)  I also found a few on-line entries about places kids like, and had our cousins (who had been to England with 3 kids) over for dinner so we could get their input (and borrow more books and brochures). I set up a daily itinerary based on our own favorite selections of things to see in England.

No Room at the Inns

Then, I began our hotel search based on these books’ suggestions, but that didn’t get me very far. It seems that rooms in England are tiny and often cannot fit 2 people, let alone 5. Further, I was told the fire codes are very strict, and hoteliers are not allowed to squeeze an extra kid in a room designated for 4 (a practice we’ve relied on with no trouble many times in the US). We wanted to make the effort to stay in one room though, for you see, a room for 5 is much less costly (by $60-100 per night) than booking 2 rooms that hold 2 or 3 each. Plus, with two rooms we parents would have to split, as our kids are too young to stay in a room alone. I was concerned that having my husband in another room would decrease crucial traveling communication between us, and increase parental exhaustion! So, the great number of ‘family-friendly’ hotels suggested by the travel books now was narrowed to just a couple, as most ‘family’ rooms are meant for 1 or 2 kids, not 3.

Searching…

Back to the internet! I discovered that the actual website of a hotel sometimes revealed that their ‘Quad’ or ‘family’ room could indeed sleep 5. Thus began my nearly 40 hours of internet research. I had to locate various hotel search engines (hotels.com, activehotels.com, Travelocity.com, smoothhound.com), request hotels in my price category and city, then identify which were in my desired neighborhood, and which had Quad or Family rooms. Then I checked travelers' reviews of the hotels on other websites. Then I had to click into the websites of each hotel, to determine if they have a room for 5. Sometimes even the hotel’s own website didn’t specifically say, so then I’d email and ask if they could accommodate our family of 5. The response was sometimes ‘yes’.

Helping Others

I spoke of my frustration with finding hotels with our cousin, Holly, who also had trouble with her family’s European travels, and who wanted to create a website to help fellow travelers with 3 or more children. I loved her idea, and offered to help, and here we are!

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