A Happy Coincidence—How I Came to Love Traveling With My Mom

My mother and I are pond scum. We concluded this on an autumn afternoon at London’s Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond, a destination for women who talk each other into tramping across Hampstead Heath and taking frigid swims among the ducks and reeds. In her seventies and my forties, we have found that we and our partners travel exceptionally well together. 

This is not what I would have expected from the woman who once refused to drop me off at college orientation if I didn’t remove an utterly innocuous tragus piercing, but we discovered a pond in the middle of our lives and relationship—a mutual willingness to plunge into things together. Given how many of my friends have parents they don’t like, parents who aren’t well enough or inclined to travel, or don’t have parents at all, I feel like I won a lottery I wasn’t conscious of entering.

Part of becoming pond scum—my working definition of which is something like ‘dirtbag-curious globetrotting buddies open to discomfort in the service of larger artistic gestures, especially if they can treat themselves to fancy warm drinks afterward’—is having the freedom to travel without young children. My mother and stepfather, who each had three children in their respective first marriages and met as divorced empty-nesters, are now Grandparents with a capital G: Their other five adult children now have 10 kids of their own, and four of those babies were born in 2018. They’ve seen a lot of PAW Patrol, is what I’m saying. Their guest bedroom is full of performance fabrics. Childless and fairly established in our careers, my husband Joe and I have relatively flexible calendars and budgets; we can commit to multi-day eclipse chases and boutique hotels on spooky moors. I suspect the other five are too sleep-deprived to begrudge us our adventures.

The four of us began to appreciate our travel unit in the years before COVID, when a “we’re all free and bored, why don’t we get together and see what happens?” weekend road trip to Cooperstown established that we could both chat happily for hours in transit and divide into baseball- and antique-focused working groups upon arrival. Joe was delighted to find that my stepfather, Doug, was just as interested in Hall of Fame esoterica as he was. He and Doug were both delighted to post up with martinis and keep on talking baseball while my mother and I walked all over town; meeting for dinner at the end of the day was just right. 

The happy accident of our overlapping interests—and what a privilege it was to have lots of time to enjoy each other’s company—hit us in full force with the pandemic in 2020, when Joe and I locked down in New York City and they did likewise in Northern California. We’d accidentally gone about a year and a half without seeing each other at that point, thanks to a series of other visits and travel that we’d prioritized more highly. I didn’t realize until we were reunited in the fall of 2021, when I cried harder at the Sacramento airport than I have since I was a child, that I’d believed I’d never see my mother again at all. 

A friend who also lives far from their family introduced me to some nauseating math: Say we all have the great good fortune to live for another three decades (my mom’s mom lived to be 99, and my stepfather’s father is now 102—it could happen), and say we get together at our casual, pre-COVID pace of once every year and a half or so. That would mean I see my mother a total of 20 more times. That sick-making thought doesn’t tempt me to move into her attic or to beg her to build a life back east like I did. It is, however, a compelling reason to swing for the goddamn fences every time we’re together.

Shortly after that reunion, we spent two weeks touring England (hence the Pond) and Scotland. We met in Iceland this March (where Mom and I floated to the edges of various geothermal springs), and we’re convening in Copenhagen this year. Our group-text brainstorms read like daydreams mixed up with rounds of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?: Has anyone been to Bilbao? Have you booked that restaurant in Reykjavik yet? How do we feel about ferries across the Strait of Gibraltar? 

I’m ignoring my magazine-writer instincts to imply that we’re some kind of intergenerational inspiration, a suggestion that strikes me as unhelpful at best and condescending if you chew on it for a bit. I will say that following our elders’ lead and booking the occasional plush property instead of engaging in my usual hotel-bargain Hunger Games has been broadening; I appreciate their luring us into indulgence. I’ve also stopped censoring my propositions to Mom: She was ultimately a no on mother-daughter tattoos to celebrate our love of wild swimming, but she was a maybe for much longer than I would have expected. 

Choppy seas scuppered a day of whale-watching we’d planned in Iceland last spring, so the four of us found ourselves with a free afternoon in Akureyri, a sleepy town whose sole movie theater was showing Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Perfect! We all like popcorn, candy, and corny jokes. A malfunctioning sound system torpedoed the movie, so we were turned back out, half-full of popcorn and blinking in the subarctic light. Perfect! Mom and I could walk along the harbor and Joe and Doug could go watch a soccer game. Perhaps we’d circle back to the art museum, where Ragnar Kjartansson’s hour-long video installation had stopped us all in our tracks: “There are stars exploding around you,” its participants sang. “And there’s nothing you can do.”

We travel well together not because we found a recipe for compromise, but because we invited each other into the adventures we were already having.

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