We’re a family of six who believes some of the best memories happen when you step away from the usual route.
We’re The Detour Family
I’m a dad of four girls, a husband, a trip planner, and the guy who somehow ends up researching everything from flights and Airbnbs to luggage, restaurants, rental cars, and whether six people can actually fit into a European hotel room.
This isn’t a site about traveling full-time or quitting our jobs to live out of suitcases.
We have a normal life at home that we love.
But every once in a while, we take a detour.
Sometimes that’s a vacation. Sometimes it’s a road trip. And sometimes it’s packing up our family of six and living somewhere else for a month—or heading to Europe for several months.
The Detour Family is where I share how we do it, what it costs, what works, what doesn’t, and what I’ve learned trying to show our girls a little more of the world.
Because sometimes the best thing you can do as a family is step away from the usual route.
How Our Detours Got Bigger
Our family travel story didn’t start with month-long stays in Hawaii or plans to live in Italy.
It started much more simply.
Around the time our oldest daughter was born, we made a decision that ended up having a much bigger impact on our family than we probably realized at the time: we bought our first Disney Vacation Club membership.
Part of our thinking was financial—we liked the idea of owning something we could use for future Disney vacations. But there was another reason that was probably even more important.
We wanted to give ourselves a reason to actually take the vacation.
Life gets busy. There’s always work to do, another expense, another commitment, or a reason a trip can wait until next year.
We figured that having DVC would almost force us to set aside the time and take at least one family vacation every year—and sometimes more than one.
That’s pretty much what happened.
Disney became a big part of our family travel while the girls were young. We returned year after year, sometimes more than once, and those trips gave us something on the calendar that was specifically about spending time together as a family.
Eventually, though, our detours started getting bigger.
Disney trips turned into weekends in the Poconos, summers in Maryland, New Hampshire, the Bahamas, North Carolina, Savannah, California, and other places along the way.
Then we tried something different.
In 2025, we packed up our family and spent about a month living in Kailua, Oahu.
Instead of staying at a resort and filling every day with activities, we rented a house.
We bought groceries. We cooked dinner. We found our favorite farmers markets. I worked. We did laundry. We went to the beach. The girls swam and surfed. And eventually we developed something that felt like a normal family routine—just thousands of miles away from home.
We loved it enough that the following summer, we came back and did it all over again.
Those two summers changed the way we thought about family travel.
We realized we didn’t just enjoy visiting new places.
We enjoyed living in them for a while.
We liked having enough time somewhere that we didn’t need an itinerary every morning. We liked finding favorite local places and returning to them. We liked having ordinary days mixed in with the adventures.
And that realization eventually led to our biggest detour yet.
We decided to pack up our family of six and spend three months in Europe, with Tuscany becoming our home away from home for most of the trip.
We don’t know exactly where the detours will take us after that.
That’s kind of the point.
Why We Share It
There are plenty of websites that can tell you the top ten things to do somewhere.
That isn’t really what I want The Detour Family to be.
I want to share what traveling like this actually looks like for our family.
How do you pack for six people?
Where do you stay when a normal hotel room isn’t going to work?
How do you move four kids, five suitcases, carry-ons and a double stroller through airports?
What does a month in Hawaii actually cost?
How do you keep working while your family is living six time zones away from home?
What worked?
What would we do differently the second time?
And what seemed like a great idea when I was researching it from our house but turned out to be a terrible idea once we actually tried it?
Those are the things I want to write about.
We’ll share the places we stay, the gear we actually use, how we plan our trips, what we spend when it makes sense to share it, and the lessons we learn along the way.
Some of our detours will be big.
Some will be small.
Some will probably go exactly according to plan.
Others definitely won’t.
But hopefully our experiences can make it a little easier for another family to take a detour of their own.
Take the Family Detour
You don’t have to move your family to Italy for three months.
You don’t have to spend a month in Hawaii.
And you definitely don’t have to travel the way we do.
For us, the idea behind The Detour Family is much simpler than that.
Life moves fast, especially when your kids are young.
Every once in a while, step away from the routine.
Go somewhere together.
Stay a little longer if you can.
Have some ordinary days in an unfamiliar place.
And see what happens.
Take the Family Detour.