Travel Itineraries

Why 7 days?

As you might have noticed unless we are travelling locally for a weekend away, our travel itineraries are almost always seven days long. We’ve found that when we hop around too much, changing locations and accommodations, we spend all our time packing and unpacking and don’t get to settle into any one spot and truly see it. About halfway through our week, we start to know our way around and find a few favourites: the best bakery, grocery store, and restaurants that work for our family. Plus travelling every few days is tiring, it’s hard on the kids and grownups.

Staying in one place is also more budget-friendly, we often get a discounted rate on our vacation rental and avoid extra cleaning fees. This also gives us the option of purchasing a week-long metro pass or a bit of a discount if we are renting a car. We choose locations that allow for the option of day trips to see the areas surrounding the city we are visiting, and we can pick up groceries that we will actually eat during our week-long stay.

This doesn’t mean that we ONLY ever travel for seven days at a time, but rather that we typically build our travel around week-long stays. When we went to Europe in the summer, we were away for just over four weeks, one week in each of the cities we visited. While it was tempting to try and see everything, the pace we chose worked for all of us and let us build in some downtime so that we could enjoy each place we visited.

Travel Days

We don’t typically plan a lot on our travel days, we are often tired from travelling, fighting the time change, and haven’t slept well the night before. Instead, we use our arrival day to get settled and find all the important spots. This varies widely depending on your perspective, for the kids it is often the pool or beach, for friends it’s the nearest coffee shop, and for me, it’s somewhere to get a few groceries or snacks. If we arrive early enough, we try to do something on our first night to get oriented to our new city, go for a walk, take a bus tour or a boat cruise to see the sites. Our last day of travel is often similarly quiet with us packing up and heading out, sometimes getting in one last visit to a favourite spot.