I nodded. Reasonable. Specific. Great idea. Then my brain did what it always does.
“We already have the futsal cruise next spring break. And what about the Galapagos? We’ve had that on the list for two years. And Machu Picchu, we said when the twins get old enough for the hiking. Iceland keeps getting pushed. Costa Rica we almost booked twice. And Svalbard, you’re the one who put Svalbard on there.”
Jen looked at me the way she always looks at me when this happens.
The list had claimed another car ride.
How the List Works
Every family that travels seriously has some version of this. Ours isn’t written down in any one place, which is both the problem and somehow the point. It lives in half-finished notes app entries, in conversations that started over dinner and got interrupted by homework, in the browser tabs that never quite closed. Jen adds things from clients who come back lit up about somewhere. I add things from podcasts, from trailhead conversations, from word puzzles apparently. The kids have started adding things too, which means the list now has opinions from people who won’t be paying for any of it.
Alaska came up the way the best additions always do: not from research, but from a moment of clarity. An interior trip. Not a cruise, not Anchorage and call it done. The real interior. Denali. The kind of scale that doesn’t translate to photographs. The kind of place where you drive for two hours and nothing changes except the mountains getting bigger. Summer would mean light and hiking. Winter would mean something else entirely: dog sleds, aurora, a version of Alaska that most people never see. Both options are legitimately on the table, which means Alaska isn’t one entry on the list, it’s two.
That’s how this works. You add one place and discover it’s actually three.
The operating philosophy, more or less.
The List, Honest
Galapagos has been on there long enough that we have opinions about how to do it right: small ship, not many passengers, long enough to actually see the island variation. That level of specificity means it’s a real plan, not a wish. It just hasn’t had a year assigned to it yet.
Machu Picchu has a clock on it in a way the others don’t. There’s a version of that trip that involves the kids at an age where they can handle the altitude, push through the physical demand, and actually absorb what they’re standing in front of. That window isn’t permanent. We know that.
Two trips that keep landing on the same side of “someday.”
Costa Rica we’ve almost pulled the trigger on twice. It keeps losing out to things that had a harder deadline: a graduation trip, a spring break that needed to work for a specific age range. Costa Rica is patient, but our patience with leaving it on the list is running thin.
Iceland we will do. We say that every year. We mean it every year.
Two very different trips. Both overdue.
Svalbard is the one that raises eyebrows when we mention it. A Norwegian archipelago halfway between the mainland and the North Pole. Polar bears outnumber people. The only reason to go is exactly that: the sheer improbability of being there. Jen put it on the list after working with a client who came back changed by it. That’s the highest endorsement anything gets in our house.
And then there’s next spring break, which is already settled. A futsal cruise: the kids’ passion, a ship, somewhere warm. That one is done. That one actually happened to the list instead of just sitting on it. We are aware of how good that sentence is.
The Thing Underneath All of It
The real interior. This is what we’re talking about.
Here’s what made that car ride feel like more than the usual list debate.
Our oldest is already at the age where summers start having their own shape: jobs, programs, friends with their own travel plans. It happened faster than we thought it would. The window where all three kids are home, present, and actually want to spend a week in the wilderness with their parents is real and it is finite. We both know it. We don’t always say it out loud, but on a long drive with no particular agenda it has a way of surfacing.
Machu Picchu matters more because of that window. So does Alaska. So does every entry on that list that requires a version of our kids that still exists right now but won’t indefinitely.
We’re not panicking about it. But we’re not pretending the calendar is infinite either.
The drive ended. The list didn’t get shorter. Alaska is officially on it in two different seasonal versions, which means we somehow left the Poconos weekend with more trips planned than when we started. That’s the thing about this life. The list is the point.
What’s on Your List?
Does your family have a running tab like this? The one that never quite resolves? We’d love to hear what’s on it. Drop your top two or three and reach out. Maybe we’ll see you there.
PS: The drive home added another Europe trip in two variations: hut-to-hut backpacking in Switzerland, or the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The list is self-replenishing. We have accepted this.
