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What No One Tells You About Traveling

And why it’s important to bring the kids along

Hoang Samuelson
7 min readJul 17, 2024
Diners in front of a restaurant in Heidelberg, Germany’s main town square. One of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen.

I hesitate to talk more about travel because part of me feels a slight tinge of guilt, coupled with a sense of privilege that I’m not sure I wholly deserve. Which is why, after I came back from my trip to Europe last year, I posted a small sliver of photos on social media and then promptly stopped. This is because I didn’t want people to think I was making them feel bad — the “oh, look at me, I was having such a great time” posts. I didn’t think people wanted to see an endless herd of photos and/or words about my trip, which was indeed a dream come true.

So I kept the memories boxed in. The photos we took remained dormant in my camera roll with the idea that some day I’ll resurrect them and put it in a photo book. Then recently, I was on an online forum where I responded to a question about life skills and was surprised by how many people liked it. It got me thinking about traveling again.

Like many people, I didn’t do much traveling during the pandemic. Aside from a few random trips to the Oregon coast, we just stayed at home and like everyone else, wondered when the pandemic was…

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Hoang Samuelson
Hoang Samuelson

Written by Hoang Samuelson

Features Editor @ Chowhound. Former lead editor @BooknBrunch.com. Writer of food, family and fiction. Based in Portland, OR. More at hoangsamuelson.com

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