"I missed my daughter's first crawl."
Travelling with kids — what families actually experience
Not the Instagram version. What actually happens when you set off with three children and the world becomes their classroom.
In 2016 I missed my daughter's first crawl. I was on a building site. Someone sent me a video.
It wasn't the crawl that hit me. It was the video.
I asked Salima: what if we made a deliberate decision to live this time differently? Not as a holiday. As a real phase. With everything that comes with it, including the difficult parts.
Salima didn't say yes straight away.
She thought about it. For a long time. And then she said: let's go.
The honest version.
The exhaustion is real.
Travelling with children is not a holiday. It's parenthood in a smaller space, with more variables and fewer resources. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't done it.
And the moments are realer.
When your six-year-old helps a fisherman haul in his net at five in the morning, she doesn't forget that. It doesn't compare to anything you can buy.
Siblings become friends.
In a camper, there's no escape. Three daughters learn to actually be together — to argue, make up, and be genuinely curious together. That bond is the unexpected gift of this journey.
Children adapt faster than you.
Every new country, new culture, new situation — children absorb it. They're not waiting for things to be familiar. They're already playing.
The screen time problem solves itself on the road.
Before we left, screens were a daily battle. One hour? Two? When does the tablet go off? After the trip, we stopped asking.
When children experience things that are genuinely interesting — a net full of fish, a market that smells of spices, a friend who speaks a language they don't know — screens can't compete. They lose automatically.
We wrote down exactly how that works — and how you can replicate the principle at home without a camper.
The Screen Time Guide →Two films. Shot on the road. In cinemas across Germany.
The first journey, the second, and everything in between — captured in two theatrical documentaries. Unplanned, unstaged, and very real.
Watch the Films →