4 Tips for Mother-Daughter Trips

Our Airbnb hosts in Colorado Springs were health enthusiasts who had run marathons on multiple continents, had a refrigerator bursting with organic fruits and vegetables, woke up at 5:30 a.m. to meditate, and trained by jogging halfway up Pikes Peak every Thursday morning. A conversation with them was enough to motivate anyone to skip dessert and do a few extra push-ups — and yet one of them said they found us inspiring.

“I love that you spend this kind of quality time traveling together,” she told me and my mother. “It makes me want to call my daughter and see if she might want to travel with me.”

This year marks the 10th year my mom and I have taken a mother-daughter trip together, dating back to a long weekend in Boston in 2006. Since then we’ve walked on a glacier in Iceland, explored art museums in the Big Apple and gone on an “Anne of Green Gables” pilgrimage on Canada’s Prince Edward Island.

Like any mother and daughter, we don’t always get along perfectly. I love a plan; she wants to be spontaneous. When we’re lost, I check a map while she asks a local for directions. After dinner I’m ready to head back to our room to read and relax; meanwhile, she’s looking for the nearest live music venue. But over the years we’ve learned to deal with our inevitable conflicts by obeying the following tips:

Find what draws you together. Though our personalities may be opposite, we share a common love of art (Mom is the only travel companion I’ve ever had who’s just as happy to spend an entire day in one museum as I am). We also enjoy hiking and browsing indie bookstores. We avoid arguments by centering our trip on activities we’re both passionate about.

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Compromise. You learned this one in kindergarten, and it applies to any journey with another person, not just mother-daughter trips. If Mom keeps us out late listening to blues music one night, we’ll make an early evening of it the next day so I can recharge. Letting one person make all the decisions leads only to resentment.

Embrace your relationship as adults. For mothers and daughters who no longer share the same home, it can be challenging — but rewarding — to leave behind the patterns of the daughter’s childhood and form a new relationship as equal adults. For us, this has meant me breaking the sometimes resentful habits of a prickly adolescent and Mom trying to be a little less over-protective.

Acknowledge that some things never change. On our flight home I was in the bathroom when the plane lurched into a sudden patch of turbulence. I stumbled out of the bathroom but couldn’t make it back to my seat because the flight attendants were hustling down the aisle with the drink cart. I ended up joining them in their jumpseats for a few minutes while we waited for the plane to settle; I knew my mom was probably worrying about me from her own seat a few rows up.

I was right. When I returned to my seat, Mom touched my arm with a sense of relief and affection any parent would recognize, no matter the age of their children. “I knew you were safe back there,” she said. “But I feel better having you with me, right here.”

Have you ever traveled with your mother or adult daughter?