Our Family Travel Vlog
The first thought of Traveling Graces came in January of 2018. Brandon and I (Ashley) had just booked our flights to join the grandparents on a summer trip to Ireland. I knew this trip would be a bit different for him, because our past travels have been more focused on fun for kids: rides, beaches, water sports, snow tubing, etc. Since Brandon had never been to Europe, I wanted to find some YouTube vlogs that would get him excited about going there!!
I was specifically looking for videos that were informative for me, showing me the sites that were more kid-friendly. Further, I wanted to find videos that were also fun and entertaining for him. Most importantly, I wanted him to see KIDS having fun in a place that looked different than our past trips. How could I help a five-year-old appreciate an old castle, a small town, and beautiful landscape? Although there were tons of amazing vlogs out there, I had trouble finding exactly what I was looking for.
This began my thoughts of chronicling our family travels around the world through a vlog and website! I had big ideas and was excited to dive in, but then remembered I knew NOTHING of website design, video editing, marketing and had little to no equipment for taking amazing videos, minor set backs right?!?! Still, I kept coming back to the excitement of our family having great videos to remember our travels by, travels that have become our most treasured memories. I had even more excitement about sharing these videos, hopefully inspiring another family to strengthen their family through experiencing new adventures together AND making it attainable for them as well. So since our initial pondering of what Traveling Graces might look like, I started digging into learning as much as I could about areas I knew hardly anything about!
I say all this to let you know that I have learned so much already but still have a long way to go. This is all a work in progress! Hopefully, every video and post will be better than the last. I know that there are a million other vloggers out there that are better at this or that, but hopefully, Traveling Graces will be put together in a way that is informative and fun for your whole family.
I also want to inform you that there won’t necessarily be daily blog posts or weekly videos. Although we do travel much more than the average family, we have lives at home as well. My husband has a career that goes through busy seasons, our kids have sports they are involved in, and our family has church activities, volunteer commitments, etc. There will be seasons that we are traveling every month, then we might have a month where our focus needs to be on the homefront. Our goal is not to spit out new content every day, but to work hard at putting out quality content as often as we can.
Going forward, our plan is to work on videos primarily and have our website be home-base where we supplement with occasional blog posts and specific, detailed information on our travels. Facebook will mainly be used to share deals to make traveling attainable for your family too! However, for this first post, I wanted to share the background of this site, our hopes for what it will be, and how it all started in the first place!
Please let us know if there are any topics or questions you would love to have addressed going forward. We would love to hear from you!!
