Why Travel Became Our Biggest Investment (Even When Life Was on 1.5x Speed)

When people find out we have three boys, the first thing they usually say is "your hands must have been full." They have no idea. With three kids under one roof, life didn't just move fast, it felt like someone had permanently set the house to 1.5x speed. Meals, homework, practices, family dinners, meltdowns, bedtime, repeat. Marco and I loved every minute of it and also, some days, could barely hear ourselves think.

That's the thing nobody tells you about parenting: it's not that you stop being yourselves, it's that you stop having the space to remember who that is. And we found, again and again, that the version of us who could think clearly, who could actually hear each other finish a sentence, who could remember why we fell in love with this whole chaotic life in the first place, that version of us only fully showed up when we stepped outside our everyday responsibilities. Even for a little while.

That's what travel gave us. Not an escape from our family, an escape into it.

The balcony rule

Somewhere along the way, we made a habit of it: all five of us crammed into one hotel room, no separate space to retreat to, and every evening we'd end up on the balcony together with whatever snacks we'd smuggled from the day's adventures. No screens buzzing, no schedules pulling at us, just one shared day to talk about. Those balcony nights are some of the best conversations we've ever had as a family, better than most conversations we've had at home, if I'm honest, because there was nowhere else anyone needed to be.

Disney, before it was easy

We became Disney regulars back in the early 2000s, and it wasn't for the reason most people assume. Our boys had food allergies, and in those days, very few destinations anywhere in the world were set up to handle that with any real care. Disney was. It’s so amazing that families can now enjoy this same care many places in the world, and we are so grateful to our Disney theme park and cruise vacations for keeping our babies safe for years. That reliability meant we could actually relax instead of white-knuckling every meal, and it opened the door to something we didn't expect: the chance to really watch our kids, closely, trip after trip, and see who they actually were.

What we saw in our kids surprised us in the best way. One of our boys bonded hard with me over something I've never grown out of: keeping the child in you alive, no matter how old you get. He's studying to be a teacher now. Another fell completely in love with the Imagineering side of things, the technology, the engineering, the way a great meal can be part of the storytelling, and he's working toward an AI/ML degree with dreams of building roller coasters one day. And our third learned something on those trips that's followed him well beyond them: how to plan a "perfect" day, watch it fall apart a little, and roll with it anyway. That skill, bending instead of breaking when things don't go to plan, has become one of the ways he manages his anxiety at school today.

We didn't set out to discover any of that. We just kept traveling, kept paying attention, and it revealed itself.

Forever friends, and Nonno e Nonna

Some of our richest trips weren't just the five of us. We traveled often in bigger groups, and for most of our vacations, Nonno and Nonna came along too. There's something about shared adventure, a delayed flight, a rainy day rerouted into something better, a sailing where everyone ends up at the same dinner table, that turns travel companions into forever friends, and turns grandparents into co-conspirators in your kids' best memories.

Looking back, every trip, every sailing, every ordinary balcony evening added up to something we didn't fully understand we were building at the time: trust. A family community our boys can carry with them forever, built on "good times" we actually lived, together, away from the 1.5x speed of everyday life.

That's why travel has been our biggest investment. Not because of where we went, but because of who we became, and who our kids became, every time we went there.