When you travel with five children, you soon learn that the most important part of any itinerary is what you leave out. I used to like having everything planned. What time we would leave, what we would see, where we would stop, and how long we would spend there. But after enough trips together, I realised that on a family holiday, even the most carefully planned itinerary is really just a starting point.
Someone will get hungry. Someone will need a bathroom. Someone will spot something by the side of the road that suddenly seems far more interesting than wherever we were supposed to be going.
And quite often, those are the stories we still talk about years later.
The journey isn’t just the bit before you arrive
As an adult, I tend to think in destinations. Once we have set off for somewhere, I want to get there. Preferably on time.
Children are much less interested in this idea.
They notice the strange rock beside the road, a glimpse of the sea between two houses, a playground or a little place that doesn’t get a single mention in the guidebook. And, of course, an ice cream shop can generate considerably more excitement than whatever cultural attraction I had planned for the day.
Having a car gives us the freedom to stop.
I used to think of these moments as detours. I’m not so sure anymore. If we can still remember an unexpected place or a ridiculous family story years later, it probably wasn’t wasted time after all.
The journey is part of the holiday too.
You don’t have to see everything
With five children, you learn fairly quickly that an ambitious itinerary and reality are not always close friends.
If we have travelled all the way to somewhere new, of course I want to see the things that interest me. The museum, the castle, the ruins, the old town. Ideally on the same day, because I already have another list for tomorrow.
But a child can spend twenty minutes fascinated by something I would walk past in three seconds. On another day, the place I would happily travel halfway across the country to see leaves them completely unimpressed.
It took me a while to accept that we don’t have to make the absolute most of every minute.
These days, I prefer to leave some space in the day. We choose one thing we definitely want to do. Anything else is a bonus.
Strangely enough, the trip doesn’t feel smaller because of it. It just feels less like something we have to complete.
The car has to fit the family
One of the practical lessons I’ve learned from family road trips is that there can be a surprisingly large gap between what works on paper and what works in real life.
A five-seater car does, indeed, have five seats. That doesn’t necessarily mean five people, their suitcases, backpacks and everything else they have brought with them will fit comfortably inside.
With a large family, you learn very quickly that boot space is not a boring technical detail. At the same time, bigger isn’t always better. A roomy car can be wonderful on a long drive. It becomes slightly less wonderful when you are navigating narrow streets in an old Mediterranean town and circling the same block for the third time looking for somewhere to park.
So when I’m looking at rental cars for a fly-and-drive holiday, I first think about how we are actually going to use the car. How much luggage will we have? Are we planning long drives or mostly short trips around the area? Will we be driving in cities? Can everyone fit comfortably enough that we’ll still be speaking to one another after two hours?
Only then do I look at the price.
This is also why it makes sense to compare offers from several rental companies rather than simply booking the first car that looks suitable.
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For me, this is the useful part of comparing rental cars: the cheapest headline price doesn’t tell you whether a car – or the rental conditions that come with it – will actually work for your family.
Plans will go wrong. And that’s okay
This probably took me longer to learn than it should have.
I used to get frustrated when something disrupted my plans. It started raining. We left later than expected. The children got tired. Something that was supposed to be open according to the internet turned out to be very much closed.
Now I know that these are not unusual interruptions to a family trip. They are family travel.
Having a car at least makes changing the plan easier. If the weather ruins the original idea, we can go somewhere else. If we find a place we love, we can stay longer. If everyone has had enough, we can head back to where we’re staying.
The original plan doesn’t always need rescuing.
Sometimes, it’s enough to rescue the day.
We don’t all have to love the same things
With five children, I also can’t expect seven people to be delighted by the same things.
What I see as a fascinating historical site may look to someone else like a collection of old stones in the blazing sun. What one child considers the highlight of the entire holiday may have everyone else looking for the exit after half an hour.
I used to be more attached to the idea that a family activity should be something the whole family enjoys together. These days, I’m much less interested in that kind of perfection.
We don’t all have to love everything.
If we visit a castle for one person, we can stop for ice cream for another. If someone would happily spend the whole day in the water, tomorrow can include something another member of the family has been waiting for.
Compromise doesn’t make a family holiday less successful. In a family of seven, it’s simply how things work.
What we actually bring home
I still plan before we travel. I probably always will.
I look at maps. I read about places. I work out what I would like to see. I like knowing what our options are.
I just no longer believe that a trip is successful because everything happens exactly as I imagined it would.
Because when we talk about a family holiday later, we surprisingly rarely remember whether we followed the itinerary perfectly that day.
We remember the place where we stopped by accident. The ice cream we turned the car around for. The wrong road that led somewhere interesting. Or the time something made us laugh so much in the car that we had to pull over.
Perhaps that is the biggest thing travelling with children has taught me.
It’s worth knowing where you want to go.
Just leave enough room for the things you couldn’t possibly have planned.