If you go on a serious vacation with your family that has kids under the ag of 13, know that you’re main reason should be that you love to travel and cannot bare the idea of waiting 13 years. If you think taking a 10 year old across Europe, dragging them into museums, cathedrals, or even amazing nature to give them some lasting experience of growth and culture, you are lying to yourself or fooling yourself.
It is tourist season up here in Scandinavia and families are particularly fun to observe. If the young kids are not havigng a complete breakdown or not whining while being physically dragged through another point of interest, they are nearly just shuffling along, glossy eyed and zombified.
They are nuot appreciating the finer points of late Danish Impressionism or Bach being played through a massive pipe organ in a some cathedral or the genius it took to build a shoddy bridge that changed everyone’s life a hundred and fifty years ago. No, they want to play with their friends. And they are not.
I say 13 because that was the age I as was when my folks took me on the whirlwind see-everything-everywhere European tour. I truly loved it, caught the bug, found plenty of things intresting... and did not have the capacity to appreciacte or absorb what was happening like I could later. In fact, I am much more present and engaged while traveling than I was in my 20’s or 30’s.
The teenagers look a lot like I must have. Interested yet awkward - wanting to be there but thinking they would look cooler without their parents.
Whitnessed at the Oslo National Gallery:
Mom: This is a complete waste if you are not going to look at the pictures (paintings).
Kid: <whinny tone> I am looking!
Mom:Well, you need to like one of them.
Kid: I do!
Mom: Which one?
Kid: That one!
Mom: Which one?
Kid: The one with all the stupid people in it!
It is tourist season up here in Scandinavia and families are particularly fun to observe. If the young kids are not havigng a complete breakdown or not whining while being physically dragged through another point of interest, they are nearly just shuffling along, glossy eyed and zombified.
They are nuot appreciating the finer points of late Danish Impressionism or Bach being played through a massive pipe organ in a some cathedral or the genius it took to build a shoddy bridge that changed everyone’s life a hundred and fifty years ago. No, they want to play with their friends. And they are not.
I say 13 because that was the age I as was when my folks took me on the whirlwind see-everything-everywhere European tour. I truly loved it, caught the bug, found plenty of things intresting... and did not have the capacity to appreciacte or absorb what was happening like I could later. In fact, I am much more present and engaged while traveling than I was in my 20’s or 30’s.
The teenagers look a lot like I must have. Interested yet awkward - wanting to be there but thinking they would look cooler without their parents.
Whitnessed at the Oslo National Gallery:
Mom: This is a complete waste if you are not going to look at the pictures (paintings).
Kid: <whinny tone> I am looking!
Mom:Well, you need to like one of them.
Kid: I do!
Mom: Which one?
Kid: That one!
Mom: Which one?
Kid: The one with all the stupid people in it!
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