Holidaying with your Parents!

As your parents get older, family holidays take on a slightly different dynamic. My parents are both
in their late 70s. They’re both still reasonably active and they love travelling. They love going to
new places, or revisiting favourite places that they’ve been before. They have the time and the
money to go wherever they want, but what they like best of all is if one of their children travels with
them. To some extent there is a bit of family bonding or nostalgia for the family holidays that we
used to have when we were growing up, but there is also a practical element to this. My parents
find it much easier if there is someone with them who can help carry their luggage, organise train
tickets, get directions, book a restaurant – all of the things that they used to do on family holidays
when we were children. So there is a definite role reversal, but I’m actually okay with that.

One of the things that I’ve learnt while travelling with my parents is that the choice of destination becomes
really important – it has to offer things that will interest them, at a pace that they can cope with.
Here are three destinations that have worked really well on our recent travels.

Vienna, Austria

Vienna worked particularly well. This is a beautiful city – impressive buildings designed with an eye
for grandeur. There are some fantastic museums and galleries to explore in Vienna, as well as
some of the old palaces and their extensive gardens. What was really great about Vienna was their
celebration of their cafe culture. There are a huge number of really good cafes throughout the city,
all offering their own signature coffee creations and all serving up really delicious cakes. This was
perfect for my parents because we could walk for a bit, explore a museum, stop for coffee and
cake, and then walk on repeating that cycle.

Biarritz, France

Seaside vacation may not be the obvious choice when travelling with your elderly parents but
Biarritz was a success. Biarritz is a beautiful place and if you are into swimming and surfing then
there is heaps here to keep you occupied. My parents loved Biarritz because we’d rented a private
house for the week so we could grab bread and groceries from the local shops, prepare some of
our own meals, and generally feel part of the neighbourhood.

Aix-en-Provence

Aix-en-Provence is a great town just to hang out in for a while, but one of the reasons that my
parents loved our holiday here was that each day we could go for a drive through the Provence
countryside, visiting a different part of the region each day, stopping for lunch as we took our time
to explore. This is the kind of pace that works best on these holidays.

Travelling with your parents can be frustrating, exhausting, and infuriating, but it can also be a lot
of fun and it’s a great way to share some really special experiences together. I guess how that’s
how they used to feel about family holidays when we were children 🙂 They probably still feel that
way about travelling with me now.

Guest post by my friend Gareth who also lives in the UK.

Photo credit: Tim Sackton under Creative Commons license.Provence.