Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand Oct / Nov 2017: The Travel Issue | Page 33

P
e
r
k
Chiang Rai, thrown snowballs in
Hokkaido, and so much more.
Those were all good and mem-
orable family trips — the four of us
together, against new backdrops,
sharing adventures we still talk about
years later.
But we’ve also discovered the un-
expected beauty of trips for just one
parent and one child. Once or twice
a year, two of us will go have an ad-
venture, while the other two stay at
home enjoying each other or taking a
different trip of their own.
Friends are often surprised when
we do it. In the fall of 2015, the first
time I posted on Facebook from a trip
alone with our youngest while my
husband was posting from another
country, a concerned friend actually
asked if something was wrong. Why
weren’t we together? Was every-
thing O.K.? It was more than O.K., I
explained.
Our youngest had been clamor-
ing for the chance to swim at the
Centara Grand in Pattaya ever since
his friends had described the hotel’s
lazy river and elaborate pools. I adore
pools and beaches. My husband? Not
so much.
Meanwhile, my husband was
craving a few days of quiet, and he’d
been wanting to see Penang’s sleepy
George Town neighborhood. It
seemed like the perfect place to take
lots of photos and spend some quiet
hours reading and writing. A few days
like that sounded really appealing to
our oldest son, too.
It struck us that maybe, instead
of trying to compromise and take
a trip none of us quite wanted, we
should travel separately. In the past,
we’d only considered the two typi-
cal travel options: Either take a family
trip, which includes all the challeng-
es of kids getting along with each
other and the family operating as a
sometimes cumbersome unit, or tak-
ing a couples trip sans kids, paying
for childcare and hoping all is well
at home.
Two years ago, when we em-
braced this third option and traveled
separately to Pattaya and Penang, we
discovered that every once in a while,
separate travel is the perfect choice.
Travel
Tokyo's
baseball
stadium,
home to
the Yomiuri
Giants
It struck us that
maybe, instead
of trying to
compromise
and take a trip
none of us quite
wanted, we
should travel
separately.
WHY IT WORKS
If you haven’t done it before, give
it a try: Plan a trip where one par-
ent takes one child on a special
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