Last week, on I Heart Radio’s Speaking of Travel show, Marilyn Ball from News Radio 570 WWNC interviewed me about managing family travel.
On the show we talked about what inspired me to pursue a life of travel and how I make the adjustment with kids. You can read a snippet of the transcript from the show below.
Marilyn Ball:
Well, how many times have you boarded a plane behind a parent with a child or God forbid, two children? All the other passengers on the plane are holding their breath hoping that the family doesn’t sit with them.
But now that parent is you.
How can you avoid fulfilling the other passengers worst fears and your own? Traveling is stressful enough for people without kids add restless impatient and messy little ones and it’s a whole new ball game.
Much of your fear is probably due to having seen those daggers of hate which other travelers throw at parents and their children. And maybe you’ve even thrown those invisible daggers yourself before. Part of it also is you just don’t know what might happen when you’re trapped ten thousand feet above ground. Even if you usually do have well-behaved kids and so you might imagine the worst from diaper blow outs and vomit on a stranger’s laptop to a six-hour screaming session.
All right, true, traveling with your family might seem pretty scary and even though you feel like you’re herding cats, the experiences you have and the memories you make just might change your life for the better. Well, the good news is my guest today is not only a traveling mother of two children, she’s very familiar with the challenges of pulling off that much-needed vacation.
Tawanna Browne Smith is the founder and editor of Mom’s Guide to Travel, a cite that provides multimedia content aimed at encouraging parents to continue exploring the world with and even without kids. Tawanna works with hotel brands and tourism boards to experience and market their products. She produces travel video content. She’s the author of an e-book on travel with young kids and self-published the Mom’s Guide to Saving Money on Family Travel. Tawanna is originally from Brooklyn, New York and is now based in the Baltimore Washington area where she joins us today.
Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here Tawanna.
Me:
Thank you so much Marilyn, I appreciate it. I’m very happy to be here.
Marilyn Ball:
Well Tawanna, you do a lot of traveling and now you have two children of your own. Tell us a little about your love of traveling and how you’re pre-kids traveling influenced how you travel today.
Me:
Well, I would say that I’ve always been a dreamer. I’ve always been that kid who was looking out of the window, and you know, just saying to myself, OK there is definitely more to the world than New York.
I went to a boarding school when I was thirteen. And when I was in school, I met kids from around the world. My best friends were from Liberia. I had another friend who was from Korea and one who was from Mexico. And it was always very interesting to have conversations with these other kids, finding out what they’re life was like in their own country, it was just so different from what I’d known.
It was always great to hear them talk about where they were going for vacation and so that created a spark in me. And I thought, “when I am older and able, I want to travel.” So after boarding school, I went to college as far away as I could but still staying in the United States. I went to school in California. And it was a ball that started rolling from there…
You can catch the rest of the transcript by listening to the audio above or on the News Radio 570 website by clicking here.
Leave a Reply