the only way for to manage as a dad has been to take his wife and two daughters with him. With this blog, Matt shares some of the insights he’s gleaned along the way, as well as tips, tricks, reviews and other fun stories.

Slowing the roll on a family trip

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 control at that speed until I pass out. (True story: In college, I was such a Clark Griswold that my friends made the name into a verb and would accuse me of “Clarking” them when I called the shots.)

If I’m traveling alone, this approach isn’t a problem—the only person impacted is moi. But when I’m traveling with the girls…well, let’s just say they’re not big fans of Clarking or being Clarked.

I was reminded of this our recent end-of-2021 getaway to Pismo Beach.

The four of us shared a room with two queen beds. We stayed at the Vespera Resort on Pismo Beach. The place was mere steps from the beach and pier. And we ended up doing a whole lot of absolutely nothing.

This vibe wasn’t my first choice. Upon our arrival, I had loosely put together an itinerary for the three days we’d be on the ground. It comprised visiting friends in San Luis Obispo, beach-hopping, checking out the Monarch Butterfly Grove, and more. I shared it with the girls our first night. Their reaction: No fucking way, dude.

I could have fought them. The last time we engaged in family travel, back when I had the backup of a spouse, I might have taken a harder line approach.

Now, however, as a (divorced and) single parent of three girls, I recognized my only option was to flex.

So, I did. And I took my itinerary. And I threw it out the proverbial window in the name of going with the flow.

Instead of jam-packing our days schlepping all over California’s Central Coast, we slept in, took long walks on the beach to look for clam shells, brought take-out back to the room to eat picnic-style on the carpet floor, and lounged while playing video games.

Admittedly, I was bored. But those girls—ages 12, 10, and 6, for review—had the times of their lives.

I’m not just guessing on that one, people; on the drive home, the three of them told me how much they enjoyed the trip. They thanked me for not doing my “usual packing-the-schedule thing” and instead that I give them space for enjoying our vacation on their terms. I was blown away by their gratitude. I also appreciated the opportunity to learn from past mistakes.

This is a lesson that will linger, for sure. As much as my tendency is to Clark, sometimes the easiest way to pave the road for a fun vacation in our new reality is to jump outside of a comfort zone and follow the leads of these kids. The same approach can work for you. Try it sometime. 

California road trip oasis

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 home.

The hotel, however, was well worth the stop: The Harris Ranch Inn, just outside of Coalinga, smack in the middle of the Central Valley.

If I wasn’t a travel writer, this is the part of the post where I’d call the HRI one of the “best-kept secrets in the Central Valley,” or a “hidden gem.” But because phrases like that make my skin crawl, I’ll put it differently: THIS HOTEL IS THE BOMB, especially if you’re traveling with kids.

The Harris family has developed an incredible piece of property with top-notch restaurants, a swanky hotel, and a pool that rivals some of the best pools in Las Vegas.

We experienced all three amenities during our stay. Most impressive was the pool. After arriving around 3 p.m., we spent our first few hours lounging in and by the fabulous water. The air was a balmy 105 degrees, so the pool really was our only option. It was so hot it hurt our feet to walk on the pavement without flip-flops. That made the water feel even better.

We also had dinner at the more casual of the two restaurants in the main building – the Ranch Kitchen. My girls, pasta aficionados, repeatedly said how the penne-with-butter-sauce was the best pasta they’d ever tasted. I thought they were exaggerating. Then I checked their bowls: empty! Even the fruit cup was unique—it contained pieces of a version of Kiss Melon that was developed for the Harris ranch and is only available there on the ranch. The kids could eat it fast enough.

Of course the girls also enjoyed our spacious room. We had a second-story corner unit with two queens, a small sitting area, and a balcony. I’m not used to staying in such luxurious digs when I road-trip; for me, it’s typically Motel 6 or Travelodge. One of the best things about the Harris Ranch Inn: It’s not much more expensive than that.

Most people—millions of people annually, I’m sure—drive right by this place and probably don’t even realize there are swanky restaurants and a fancypants hotel there. To be honest, I’m guessing many people know Harris Ranch because of “the smell.” The place is a working cattle ranch, which means a) There’s always a lot of manure, and b) They’re slaughtering cows, which can be stinky in its own right.

My wife and I, however, have a bit of a stronger connection to the place; a connection that goes back to when we first became parents.

Back in 2009, when L, our oldest, was just a baby, Powerwoman and I took a road trip to L.A. to attend a friend’s wedding. On the way down, my wife had to feed the baby, but the heat rendered our strategy of nursing in the idling car impossible. We were searching for a place where she could go inside and be cool while she nursed. We found that place in the Harris Ranch Inn.

Nobody bothered us while we sat in a corner of the lobby and quietly did our business. Afterward, I peeked around, marveling at the pool and the hotel grounds and thinking to myself: Someday I’ll stay here.

That someday was this week. I can’t wait to go back.

Wandering Pod in The Washington Post

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,” appeared online yesterday. I believe it will appear in print this coming weekend.

When I did the interview, I thought I might be one of 10 or 12 “experts” she was interviewing for the piece. Turns out I ended up being one of two central voices in the story. The other source: a super-smart woman named Lynne Ticknor, education director of the Parenting Education Program in Kensington, Maryland.

Overall, the story provides a cornucopia of tips for making family road trips easier. I share a bunch of tidbits I previously have offered here. It’s pretty neat to see them all organized into one single piece.

Please read the story. Please pass it along. And please heed my advice. I know I’ll be reviewing the pointers next month as the girls and I gear up for an 8-day SoCal down-and-back without Mom. Who knows? Maybe reading my own insights even will inspire me to try something new.

Making a Splash with Family Travel

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 Francisco. Heck, sometimes we rarely leave our town.

Such was the case this past weekend, when, after a big rainstorm, I took the girls to a local park. The park sits next to the Russian River, and I know the place gets pretty muddy after a rain. That’s precisely why we went. Seriously.

I told the girls we were going to “hike.” Really, however, I had one plan and one plan only: To bring them to this trail system, encourage them to splash in puddles, and sit back to enjoy what happened next.

They followed the plan perfectly; all three of them were up to the tips of their rainboots within five minutes of leaving the parking lot. They enjoyed the puddle jumping so much that the three of them ran ahead on the trails to make sure they “scouted” puddles before I could find them and assess them myself.

One time, Baby G misjudged the depth of a puddle and got a boot full of water. Another time, Little R lost her balance and fell backward—straight on her rear. Then, of course, there was the Big Girl, who loves puddle-jumping but has anxiety about muddy clothes, so she hiked her pant legs up to her knees.

We stayed for nearly two hours. We were never more than seven miles from our front door.

About a week has passed, and the girls have talked about or puddle adventure at least two times every day. For them, this was a major family travel experience. Yet we didn’t “travel” at all.

Feeling the pain

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 explaining that he and his wife spent three days on the ground with three kids under the age of 11. Then he launched into a laundry-list if stuff that went wrong along the way. The bullet points tell frightening tales of everything from the challenges of managing connecting flights with kids to the fact that kids will hang on fences and guard rails no matter where they are.

Sure, the specifics might be different, but we Villanos have had this same experience at Disneyland time and time again. We’ve had the experience at other destinations, too. I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that every parent has had it every time he or she has ever taken with kids. It’s part of what makes traveling with kids real. It’s simply part of the deal.

I think Edwards himself says it best at the very end of the post: “Swore up and down that we were Disneyland[ed]-out, but feel confident that this will all happen again and again and again until we are broke or dead.”

Quite honestly I’m not sure I could have said it better myself.

The Worst Family Travel Destination in the West

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, instead I was disappointed by the underdeveloped facilities, the poor signage, the terrible food, the overrated and overblown “skywalk,” the price, and—perhaps most egregiously—the complete and total lack of safety precautions, considering that the attraction sits on the edge of one of the steepest cliffs in North America.

Put differently, I’m glad I didn’t take my kids to the Grand Canyon Skywalk because (they would have been bored out of their minds and) at least one of them surely would have fallen to her death.

To be fair, the idea behind the attraction is great. The Skywalk itself is a semicircular glass walkway cantilevered out over the edge of the South Rim of the canyon. The Hualapai Tribe built the place in 2007 as a way to get tourists to their reservation—a massive parcel of land far from the national park sites but close enough to be a day trip from Las Vegas. Because it was the first of its kind at the Grand Canyon, the Skywalk got major attention when it opened. It has been a pretty well-known tourist attraction ever since.

Execution, on the other hand, is lacking. Now visitors must park at a visitor center and board busses that stop at three spots along the way: A recreated (and supremely contrived) Old West village, the Skywalk, and Guano Point—the site of an old guano mining operation.

Of these three stops, the Skywalk is the main attraction. It is attached to an elaborate building with a small museum about the Hualapai tribe. It is surrounded by food trucks. Off in the distance, there’s a modest amphitheatre. Rules on the glass walkway are bizarre. You must wear booties on your shoes so you don’t scuff the glass. You have to stick your bags in lockers before you head out—nobody can carry anything with them. Also, and most annoyingly, you’re not allowed to bring cell phones out onto the walk. If you want pictures, you have to pay (a ton of money to) the Annie Leibovitz wannabes on staff.

Also peculiar: the lack of safety protocols.

Outside of the main Skywalk building, there is absolutely no fence or security system preventing visitors from falling over the edge of the canyon. Sure, the tribe employs a few folks who walk up and down the path near the edge warning people to stand back if they get too close, but if you go with a kid who’s quick and doesn’t listen, you could lose your kid forever. (If you go with a stupid grownup, you might lose him—the dumb ones always are men—forever, too.

The Guano Point area is infinitely more interesting than the Skywalk. There’s history in the remnants of a 1960s-era mining apparatus. There’s a decent hike. The view down the canyon provides great scale of just how deep the chasm really is, and a unique perspective of the Colorado River as it snakes by.

Still, the name—which effectively invokes bird shit—also is a very strange choice. Nothing named “guano” sounds appealing. Why not just use the tribal name?

My final complaint about the Grand Canyon Skywalk experience revolves around price. Unless I read the website incorrectly, the basic ticket came in somewhere around $60. For just a few dollars more, I was able to prepay for a “meal.” The website said nothing about what this meal comprised, but it seemed like a good deal until I was on site. After polling workers about which stop had the best options for the ticketed meal, I beelined for the café at Guano Point. Here, with my admission, I received a scoop of barbecue beef, a scoop of mashed potatoes, a half-ear of corn, a bowl of wilted salad, a cookie, and a bottle of water. It was underwhelming and would not have satisfied my kids.

Perhaps the biggest positive of the day trip to Grand Canyon Skywalk: The drive from Las Vegas. I went out with two friends, and on our journey we drove through one of the largest natural Joshua Tree forests in the world. The views were insane—almost alien. At one point the three of us parked the car, got out and walked around amid the trees, giddy with excitement. Compared to the experience of walking out over the edge of the Grand Canyon, this was what I’ll remember most on the day.

I know my kids would have felt exactly the same.

Happy Free National Park Day

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 National Park Service is granting us only four free days, down from 10 last year.

Let me repeat that. Last year and years before it, we had 10 free days. This year we have four.

If you think this is just a coincidence, think again. Under the “leadership” of our new President and Secretary Ryan Zinke, the U.S. Department of the Interior is abusing our national park system, shrinking national monuments, attempting to change rules to sell off land for profit, proposing rate hikes, and, yes, even taking away free days.

Put differently, the people running our government are cheating us out of the park system that was established for the “enjoyment of the people” all those years ago.

IMHO, there are two main ways to fight back. First, of course, is to take advantage of all of the free days we now get. Go today. Go April 21, which is the first day of National Park Week (also the week of Earth Day). Go Sept. 22, National Public Lands Day. And go on Veterans Day, which is Nov. 11.

In addition, please support our parks throughout the rest of the year, however and whenever you can.

Remember: Family travel doesn’t have to be big or expensive or once-in-a-lifetime incredible. It can be a few hours at your closest park. Just get out there.

Hunting for Dollars

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. Naturally, then, once we found our first dollar of the day, we treated the excursion like a treasure hunt.  Each of our three girls walked away with quite a bounty.

Later in the day, as we sped home in our Honda Odyssey, we hit the Internet to do some research.

We learned that sand dollars actually are close relatives of sea urchins. We learned that live sand dollars are a bit like ravioli—tough outside, soft inside. We also learned that the petal-shaped design actually is a bunch of pores that help the animals move.

Without question, the three-hour stroll was my favorite segment of the entire trip. A quest! Science! Beautiful views! The best part: It was all totally free.

These types of escapades represent the very best of family travel. They incorporate serendipity and fascination. To be clear, none of these moments is perfect; at one point there on the beach, Baby G was upset that a sandpiper flew away and started bawling like she’s never bawled before. Overall, however, these adventures are magical. I wish all of you at least one of these experiences on your next trip.

Toddlers as Truth

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 end of our round-trip journey, the child must have uttered the word, “Fun!” at least 60 times. At one point, she screamed it, screeching like one of the macaw parrots down below. Every time she repeated that word, she made me so happy that all I could do was laugh. My heart was so full I felt like it might pop inside my chest.

Baby G was right, it *was* fun. Our day at the zoo was a day I’ll remember forever—toddler truths and all. I hope she feels the same.

The Gambler Lesson

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 nose was a snot faucet, and she took Little R’s brand new Lego set and smashed it to bits. Or how the same baby nailed her head on the door jam as she was flailing about in an attempt to avoid my clutches. Or, going back even farther, how that very same 2-year-old slept for 20 minutes, then woke up and refused to go back to sleep.

I mean, really, take your pick.

Meteorologists have been calling the unusual cold snap back East a “bombogenesis.” With that in mind, I’d like to refer to what happened on Day No. 3 of my solo road trip with the girls a “behavior bombogenesis.” To be completely honest, I’m somewhat relieved that the only casualty was my social life.

What’s more, now that I’ve got the perspective of time (and now that all three girls are fast asleep and I’m typing this blog post from a darkened living room), I also think tonight’s events are a valuable reminder that sometimes when you’re traveling with kids, it’s OK to give up.

I wince to think about how the night would have played out if I had forced the issue. Perhaps the baby would have fallen down stairs? Perhaps she would have fallen asleep in the car, only to become inconsolable upon waking (or, even worse, incapable of going back to sleep later in the night). I certainly wouldn’t have relaxed, instead feeling the need to monitor her every move.

No, I’m not jazzed about having spent $70 on room service. And I’m downright disappointed to miss catching up with my old pal (and meeting her kids).

But when it comes to family travel—especially when you’re traveling with young kids—you need to heed the wise words of Kenny Rogers: Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.

The bottom line: There’s never shame in surrendering as a parent. The real mistakes arise when you push too hard .