My son had disappeared. While I strained to catch every third sentence from our Beefeater tour guide at the Tower of London, Wells, my 8-year-old, had walked off. Finally I looked down and spotted him sitting outside our scrum of tourists.
“Mom, I can’t hear anything he’s saying,” Wells stage-whispered. My suggestion to “just scooch closer” was met with a dramatic eye roll. “I’ll just wait over here until the tour’s over, Mom,” he said, stomping off.
“He’ll thank me for this later,” I thought as I spun around and tried to rejoin the tour, smug in the knowledge that I was fulfilling a dream to show my boy one of western civilization’s most important historic sites. Flash forward three months later: Like a Pop-Tart sprung from a toaster, I watch Wells fly above the Caribbean Sea. My husband has just launched him from an inflatable blob bobbing off the shore of Bay Gardens Beach Resort & Spa on the northwest corner of Saint Lucia.
Nearby, on a floating trampoline, a pair of elementary school-aged sisters from Rochester, New York — my son’s new best friends — cheer his aerial acrobatics. He Evil Kenevils his way along the resort’s massive floating Splash Island waterpark, then races back to the girls, the three falling into a heap of giggles. I have never seen my only child so happy on .
That’s when it suddenly struck me: Maybe I’ve been approaching the whole family travel thing all wrong. I’ve always dismissed amusement-related trip acti.
