Big girls. Beach. Beautiful. Today, our annual celebration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the first free national park day of the year. This means every single American gets free entrance to every national park and national monument site in the country. It also means you’ve got no excuse to spend the kids’ day off from school bumming around indoors. But before you get too excited, before you furiously fire up another window in your Internet browser to locate your nearest park and figure out how to get there, I want you to get angry, I want you to get pissed. This year the Natio ..read more

Little R and some of her bounty When my wife and I pre-booked the final night of our road trip in Morro Bay, we had one thing on our minds: Walking on Morro Strand State Beach. Which is precisely how we spent the last day of our trip on Wednesday. But the Villano family beach walk brought with it a surprise. Sand dollars. Hundreds of them. All over the beach. It turns out January is prime time for finding dead and desiccated sand dollars on the sandy beaches of Central California. Because Morro Strand is one of the longest beaches in the area, it is renowned for its sand dollar-hunting. Natura ..read more

Tip No. 1: Have potty will road trip. Despite this very blog, despite the fact that I’ve now parented THREE human children, I often forget I’m an “expert” on the subject of family travel. To me, a lot of this stuff is just life. It’s how we roll. Every now and again, however, I’m reminded that people actually look to me for perspective. Such as earlier this week, when a reporter for The Washington Post featured me in her “On Parenting” article about tips for surviving summer road trips with kids. The piece, titled, “How to conquer 4 common road trip challenges to have less chaos and more fun ..read more

If you’ve ever seen any of the National Lampoon’s “Vacation” movies, you know that Clark Griswold’s travel style is nothing short of insane. Go here, do this, go there, do that. Go, go, go. Go until you can’t go any more. If Clark had his druthers, he’d run poor Ellen and Rusty and Audrey into the ground. And while this Type A travel persona makes for great character development in a movie script, it’s kind of annoying in real life. I know this because I’m a Clark Griswold, dear readers. My default travel speed is GO. When I travel, I start the day at 70 mph and generally operate on cruise con ..read more

The pool at HRI. Heaven. The girls and I are road-tripping around California again, our second such road trip of the calendar year. The destination this time looks a lot like the destination back in January: Southern California. Then we crammed the trip into five days. This time we’re stretching it out into eight. That means we get some extra time to take things more slowly than usual. Which means a few extra nights on the back end in Santa Monica to see a good friend and meet his new lady. It also explains why we spent our first night crashing in a hotel less than a half-day drive from our ho ..read more

Feet in puddles. The best part of our trip. One of the biggest misconceptions about family travel is that you have to splurge for airfare and fly somewhere faraway to have an experience your kids will remember. The truth: All you have to do is get the kiddos out of the house. I’m reminded of this all the time, as we’re lucky enough to live in a part of the world with seemingly infinite natural beauty. When we tire of the routine, we pile in the car and head to the Pacific Ocean, about 45 minutes away. When we want a Big City experience, we shoot down the freeway and spend the day in San Franci ..read more

Clint Edwards and family. Family travel can be full of wonderful, magical moments that everybody remembers forever. Most of the time, however, as any parent will tell you, the experience verges on shitshow, complete with meltdowns, tantrums, complaining, and whining—from kids and parents alike. This is precisely why I loved a recent post from Clint Edwards, a fellow father-of-three who blogs about parenthood at No Idea What I’m Doing. The post in question wrapped up an Edwards family trip to Disneyland, and was titled, “What a trip to Disneyland really looks like.” Edwards set up the piece by ..read more

No pictures, no fun on this walk. It is with great embarrassment and shame that I admit I never had visited the Grand Canyon before this month. It is with even greater embarrassment and shame that I admit I tried to rectify this sad reality with a road trip to the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a South Rim attraction far away from the Grand Canyon National Park entrances that everybody knows and loves. Let’s just say I was sorely disappointed. It wasn’t the view that bummed me out—so long as you’re actually looking at the 4,000-foot-deep chasm in our continent, you pretty much can’t go wrong there. No ..read more

One of the best things about exploring the world with a toddler is that she lacks all semblance of an internal editor. When things suck, Baby G says so. When things rule, she says that, too. Naturally, then, when the two of us rode the Alaska Airlines Skyfari gondola ride today during the Villano family’s rain-soaked visit to the amazing (but outrageously expensive at $54 per grownup and $44 per adult) San Diego Zoo, I was eager for my youngest daughter’s hot take. It came one minute into our ride. She looked over the side, giggled, and said, “Fun, Daddy! Fun! Fun!” From that point until the e ..read more

Calmer times, today at Legoland California. Here’s how tonight was supposed to go: The girls and I would leave our hotel at 4:45, pile in the car, drive 15 minutes to the house of an old college friend, and hang there through dinner before coming back. I had no set bedtime in mind for the kids, but I figured maybe they’d be down by 930 or so. Here’s how tonight actually went: The four of us never went anywhere, we ordered room-service dinner, and all three girls were asleep by 8 p.m. Of course there’s more to the story than that. Like how the baby threw the wildest tantrum of her life, her nos ..read more