Off the Beaten Path Is Not a Cliché

It’s a choice. Every single day of every trip, you choose: the postcard version, or the real one. The Rome everyone photographs, or the Roman neighborhood where nobody speaks English and the grandmother at the trattoria seats you next to her family because there’s nowhere else.

We choose the second one. Every time.

After 90+ countries and years of traveling full-time with our kids, we know that the real culture of a place isn’t on the main tourist drag. It’s in the secondary cities, the inland towns, the fishing villages, the mountain markets. It’s in the places where people actually live — and where they’re genuinely happy to see you, because you made the effort to find them.

Local Friends Are the Real Souvenir

This isn’t just a philosophy for us — it’s a practice. When we travel, we look for the people. The shop owner who’s been there thirty years. The family at the next table who invites us to try their grandmother’s recipe. The kids at the playground who run up to Alaska without speaking a word of the same language and are best friends within five minutes.

This is especially important with our own kids. We want them to have a reference point beyond their neighborhood, their school, their country. We want them to carry the faces of real people from real places in their memory — not just the names of monuments.

Because local friends change you. They make the world smaller and more human. They make it harder to reduce any place to a stereotype. And that, honestly, is the whole point.

Where We Go

We’re drawn to Europe’s secondary cities, Southeast Asia’s countryside, Japan’s rural towns, Latin America’s cultural heartland. We love places that reward the curious — the ones that feel like a secret you’ve been let in on.

We share everything: the specific towns, the restaurants with no English menu, the hotels that feel like someone’s home, the drives that take twice as long and are twice as good. No gatekeeping. The more people who find these places, the better chance they have of surviving the way they are.