Hello! Welcome to our very first episode of the Ready Set Depart podcast!

I’d like to introduce you to me and my family! I’m Ashley, the mom and chief planner of the group. Then there’s my husband Brent who is the Chief driver and all around calm guy. And then we have our son who we will call Trooper who is always up for an adventure.

We are a family of travelers, but not the kind that's been to 100 countries, though that would be cool. We're the kind who have full-time jobs and school and businesses and pets and responsibilities. But we still get out and travel as much as we possibly can.

Not only do we travel with our son but we often travel with our parents or even grandparents. That can bring difficulties that you can't even plan for, but it's still pretty amazing to do.

So for this first episode we wanted to talk about why we travel. Why do we make an effort and why is it important to us.

The first reason that we travel is to see this big beautiful world we live in! We love the different sites and smells and views that you can see when you are in a different place! We are very curious people which probably is what causes us to want to travel as much as we do. We love to see new things, meet new people, and just learn everything that we can learn.

The second reason we love to travel is to see things in person that we’ve only ever seen in books. Let me explain:

Our first big trip was to England and France for our honeymoon. This was the first time I'd ever been out of the country and I was so excited to see things that I'd only ever seen in books. I can distinctly remember turning a corner and seeing Westminster Abbey and I cried. It almost felt surreal being there and seeing it up close and remembering all those things I had read. That is why I travel.

Third, I especially love seeing the different plants wherever we go. I’m a horticulturist which just means I'm a gardener that has read a lot of books and gotten a degree with it, so seeing plants that I've never seen before is pretty cool. Or to notice silver maples that are pruned into rectangles along the Champs de Elysee in Paris. Or to see beautiful garden Gates or different ways to grow your vegetables it's pretty exciting.

Our fourth reason to travel is to have a change in routine. Life can get a little bit monotonous sometimes, and just taking a moment to get out of that routine breathes new life into our lives!

And the last reason we love to travel is…we love to be together as a family! We love sharing these experiences. We love laughing about failures and saying, Do you remember when?

Trooper will share with you his favorite thing about travel during his segment called Troopers Travel Tips for Kids! So stay tuned for that.

So, the question is why listen to this podcast? Well hopefully you'll find us entertaining or educational or all of the above. But what we really want to do is to inspire you to travel.

I used to think traveling meant that you had to fly to exotic places and see exotic things or at least travel outside of your state for sure. But then during the shutdown when our travel bubble shrunk, I realized how many amazing things were right in our backyard that we had never seen before.

We live next to 3 National parks, I love National parks, and we had never been to them. We live near so many beautiful state parks and we have never seen them. We'd never even been a tourist in our own city. We would fly for 10 hours to see beautiful things, and I realize there are beautiful things within an hour of where we lived if not 20 minutes.

So what I want to inspire you to think of how travel can be a 15 hours flight to japan, or it can be 15 minutes in your car to go to that State Park you've never gone to before, or to that museum you've never been to in your own hometown. The most important part is that you do it together. You learn together and you laugh together and you make memories together.

So whether you're going to travel to Germany or you're traveling to the county next to yours, let's all be inspired to do it. With our whole family.

And now it's time for troopers travel tips for kids.