Behind the journeys.
We are a family of four. I just happen to be the one planning where we go next.
In 2013, I surprised my husband with tickets to an FC Barcelona match. We were flying from Venice and, thinking we had plenty of time, decided to visit the city before our flight.
Roadworks, a confused GPS and some very poor time management later, we missed it.
Luckily, there was another flight that day. We bought new tickets and made it to Barcelona — running into the stadium just as the match was starting.
We've been at the airport at least two hours early ever since.
Some travel lessons stay with you.
Later that year, an organised trip we'd booked to Paris and London was cancelled because too few people had signed up. So I decided to organise everything myself.
It worked — mostly. Our London accommodation turned out to be a basement apartment that felt more like a bunker, and I barely slept.
A few years later I planned our first bigger family journey to the Seychelles entirely on my own.
Somewhere along the way, I realised I genuinely enjoy the part many people would rather skip: researching destinations, comparing flights, finding the right accommodation and figuring out how everything fits together.
We don't travel as cheaply as possible, and we don't travel luxuriously either.
We look for comfortable, clean places in good locations.
Over the years, small experiences changed the way I plan: waiting with two tired little children for a shuttle to a remote airport car park, spending more than an hour waiting for a taxi after a late-night arrival, or discovering that a transport option that sounded easy online wasn’t nearly as practical with children and luggage.
Now I prefer to spend a little more where it genuinely makes travelling easier — not for luxury, but to avoid unnecessary stress.
For us, comfort isn't about luxury. It's about removing unnecessary stress.
We used to plan almost every day of a trip because we wanted to make the most of our time.
Eventually, we realised we were sometimes making ourselves tired and grumpy instead.
So I still plan. A lot. But the plan is now a framework, not a schedule.
We leave room for slow mornings, tired days, spontaneous changes and simply deciding that we'd rather stay by the pool.
I research before we leave so that once we're there, we can decide what we actually feel like doing.
I plan a lot so we don't have to plan much when we're there.
When we landed in the Seychelles with two small children and our luggage, we planned to take the local bus from the airport to the port. Online, it sounded simple.
In reality, the bus was so crowded that getting ourselves inside would have been difficult enough, never mind the children and our luggage.
Technically, the information we'd found was correct. Practically, it wasn't right for us.
Today, AI makes finding ideas and planning easier than ever, and I use it too — including while creating this website. But I still check current information, compare options and do my own research.
Information can be correct and still not be practical for our family.
Knowing that something can be done isn't quite the same as knowing whether I'd actually recommend doing it.
We are a football-loving family, so matches and stadiums have a habit of finding their way into our travels.
Sometimes football is part of the trip. Sometimes it's the reason for the trip in the first place.
Either way, our journeys aren't only about seeing famous places. They're about the things we enjoy experiencing together.
I'm not a photographer, and I don't travel to document everything.
Most of the photographs here were taken with my phone simply because it's always with me — little pieces of our journeys I wanted to remember.
Some turn out beautifully. Some don't. And many of our best moments were never photographed at all.
I'd rather experience the trip than experience it through a camera.
This isn't a collection of perfect trips.
Some places amazed us. Others didn't. We've stayed somewhere we loved and somewhere that looked much better online. We've made plans that worked perfectly and others that didn't work at all.
Those are the experiences I want to share.
Not to tell you how you should travel, but to show you how we did it — what worked for us, what didn't, what I would do differently and what I'd happily do all over again.
Because every family travels differently.
This is simply how we found our way of travelling.