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No I don’t feel like a child when I travel with my parents. At 24, I reverted to a teenage version of myself, relying on my mother to secure my passport and my father to put the itinerary together.
But for me, these holidays are more important than ever. As an adult, quality time with my parents has dwindled as we lead our own lives. I want to spend more time with them and find new adventures. Now that I’ve grown up, I’m no longer a mere spectator at a holiday event. I actively allocate time, effort and annual leave to make our family trips happen – though I leave the details to my folks.
And I’m not the only one. There’s a renewed interest in twenty- and thirtysomethings to vacation with parents, and travel trade publications are calling multigenerational vacations one of the industry’s biggest post-pandemic trends. Thanks to open borders, families — with their grown children — are heading interstate or overseas for the first time in years.
‘I can never see that side of her.’ Nikhitaa and Sakun
Nikhitaa and her mother Sakun live in different states of the US and meet for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. But after a five-year hiatus, they returned to Malaysia to see family in 2022 and were quickly reacquainted with their home away from home – and driving in the left lane.
Nikitaa: Watching my mom was the best thing about going back to Malaysia. [In Malaysia] It is very clear [my mum] She is very comfortable there and knows everyone. It’s crazy. I don’t think I know so many people in my life and she knows so many people in one city!
Sometimes I feel like everyone is in everyone else’s business, which actually feels really sweet because I didn’t grow up in that kind of culture in America. But to my mother, everything seemed natural. I don’t want to say that she doesn’t feel like she’s in America, but I can see how easy it is to go back and remember the ways, the language, and the culture.
I can’t hear her speak Malay or Tamil here in America but she is very fluent in Malaysia… I never see that side of her.
I laughed. It was refreshing to be back in Malaysia after so many years. I fell back into old habits, surprised at how much I remembered. Even compared to driving on the other side of the road [with[ the US, I was a bit worried about. But I managed it easily.
I think I was most surprised by how excited Nikhi and her sister were walking down memory lane with me. I took them to our old haunts, a lot of them were places they had been to when they were younger.
As a mum, them being so excited to come back to Malaysia made this trip so much more meaningful.
‘It was a bit weird living together again’: Stephen and Sandy
When Sandy’s three children were growing up, the family would often go on beach holidays together. Now the family are scattered around Western Australia – Sandy and her husband in Geraldton, her youngest son, Stephen, in Perth – but for their most recent family holiday they returned to the coast for a camping trip at Quobba Station, north of Carnarvon.
Stephen: I think we planned this trip for a while before we went, but I don’t know because I just turned up. Some of us camped and some stayed in a cabin. It wasn’t exactly camping … They were glamping.
It was a bit weird all of us living together again, but at the same time it was like old habits kicked in. We used to play board games when we were growing up and we did that together on this trip too.
As a kid you don’t really think about cooking or paying for stuff . But now I definitely have a much better understanding of how much it took for my parents to take us on trips as kids, both money- and effort-wise. So I’ve gained a better appreciation for it.
Sandy: My kids grew up on the beach so we loved Quobba Station. All my older kids were happy to sleep in their swags with their partners; [my husband] Elliott and I booked a cabin and Stevie was very quick to get us into the cabin. He wasn’t too keen on the idea of swag!
After newspaper promotion
Now I think it would be great to go on holiday with them, I just love it. On day one, the boys went on a fishing trip and the girls went to a day spa. [The boys] It didn’t hold much so by the end of the day Stevie wanted to come to the spa.
My parenting philosophy is always filling my children’s memory capacity. [When] When you go to a funeral or hear about someone’s death, you just think: It’s great to have a happy memory of that person. [were] All together.
‘The craziest thing was definitely the Las Vegas earthquake’: Alex and Radu
Alex always had a close relationship with her mother and father Radu. So in 2019, it seemed like a natural fit for Alex, 21, to go on vacation together. As they cross the United States one unforgettable summer, they encounter an accident – but survive to tell the tale.
Alex: Basically, everything that can go wrong on this holiday, will go wrong on this holiday. And there were things none of us could control!
They work. I mean we had a lot of amazing events, really. In the year We’ve experienced the largest black exodus in Manhattan since the NYC shutdown in 1977. We saw a tornado drive into Maryland. So we had a 15 hour flight delay to get to Niagara Falls because they couldn’t close the plane doors first. Then they couldn’t find the pilot.
Alex: The craziest thing was definitely the Las Vegas earthquake. I remember, the day after the Fourth of July, when we came back from sight seeing, I noticed the bottle on my bedside table shaking and I thought, “Oh, that’s a little weird.” I thought nothing of it until I noticed that my TV was shaking violently.
My father ran into the room shouting that there was an earthquake. I think my body went into shutdown mode and I just stood under the door frame with my dad following.
They work. I was ridiculously on the toilet. And the room had one of those sliding doors. So I’m in the bathroom and suddenly the sliding door starts going left, right, left, right. I knew right away, it wasn’t right. I’ve been through massive earthquakes before to know what it feels like. I quickly grabbed Alex and my wife to make sure they were safe.
Alex: While it’s crazy how unlucky we are with these amazing holiday experiences, it’s definitely something we can laugh about now. We will never forget that family holiday! Now I’m not a kid we can focus on touring and doing different things together. But I guess it didn’t improve much in terms of our relationship because we were always close.
They work. It was a gradual thing as we used to spend holidays together since she was a child. Like Alex, she is five years old and now an adult. We always had fun together. So why do we stop celebrating together?
Alex: I’ve always been close to my parents, so it only makes sense that we enjoy traveling together.
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