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A lot of my time on the web is linked very closely to my time as a child / teenager traveling with my parents. My mom and I always loved to travel together and she would get me to research and book things for us, starting from age 10 or so. So it has been almost 30 years of doing this.
I'm extremely good at picking and buying flights, train tickets, bus tickets, hotels,.. anywhere in the world. it was a superpower i went on to leverage in my own personal life (i was always able to get places with minimal stress because i have excellent travel agent skills). like, i actually enjoy doing it. i still do.
I've been planning things for them this entire trip. (My parents live 8800 miles away) They don't need luxury, but of course cleanliness and comfort are important.
Yesterday, we made it to LA hitching a ride with a friend from Monterey. She prefers to drive the back roads instead of the 5, so we also got to see much more interesting scenes. The vast farmlands of central California that go on, and on.
When we arrived in Los Angeles, we had ramen, gyoza, pork buns.
This morning, they are off on a bus adventure by themselves to get dimsum from Chinatown. After many years in California my breakfast repertoire has expanded to also include tacos for breakfast, so I am going to do that myself at Tacos 1986 or Guisados.
There are so many ways in which my early travels with my parents have shaped me as a person.
I vividly remember my first trip 'abroad'. I was 6 years old. We went to Kuching, Sarawak, because that was all my middle class parents could afford on their salaries. I was a little jealous my classmates could go to Hong Kong or Japan or Australia, but ultimately these side quests on what they could afford were vastly more important to me.
We took the public bus from Kuching to Damai. My tooth fell out (because i was 6 years old). My dad took out a napkin and put it in his pocket. My mom (who was a nurse) gave me a painkiller then said we would be shortly alighting for durian and noodles and wondered if I could still eat, with a toothache.
Every evening of the trip, my dad would write his budget and keep a record of how much we spent (he made, I think $400 a month at that point). He would encourage me to write about everything I saw and experienced and ate and felt. He would then read it and discuss it with me. It was his dream to be able to write as eloquently in English as I did, he later said.
I recently found a photo of my mom in Mae Salong, Thailand. It was yet another example of 'I had a random idea... and she may not have always understood all of it but wanted to support me anyway'.
One time I read about how the Kuomintang had soldiers from the regiment in Yunnan, in northern Thailand. "Wouldn't it be great if we could go and meet them before they died??" (I was a China / Thailand history buff)
She wasn't enthused by the history parts but she loved the idea of a trip.
We flew into Bangkok (for like $100 one way), and took a series of public buses to Mae Salong. There, we walked around asking people in Chinese and Thai, where we could find these ex soldiers.
She translated for me (I speak several Chinese languages, and some Thai, but my mom seems to have the ability to speak every single Chinese language), and we ate noodles and had fresh soy milk from the wet market every morning before we went to meet a soldier.
I never published any of that work but I recently found some of the photos and notes from that trip.
I've had so many adventures with them!
@skinnylatte what a beautiful memory, thanks for sharing 
@skinnylatte I love hearing about your family and the love and support you all show each other. Thanks for sharing with us.
@skinnylatte wow I would love to hear more about this
@vatthikorn here's an intro https://siamworld.com/mae-salong-kmt-chinese-village/
@skinnylatte can this be a blog post please??
@skinnylatte what a gorgeous memory!
It's always been one of my favourite things and it really is a skill. I think i'd have been a good travel agent. I love it because i enjoy it but also because it helps with my autistic anxiety surrounding travel to have a little bit of time to process what i'm doing and where I'm going too.