Adventure Family Travel
We are an adventure travel family. We also go to school, work, play sports and take music lessons and we balance our travel and adventure life with managing our homestead in coastal NH.
Our mission is to use our expert experience traveling to help make adventure travel more accessible for everyone.
We’ve traveled extensively in the United States and around the world and have so much more travel planned in the next few years. As a family, we love outdoor adventure and there is always more to learn and new adventures to pursue. We are avid hikers, backpackers, rock climbers, skiers, sailors, and bikers and are ready to share everything we know to help you get out there and adventure.
Here on Chasing ADVNTR, you will find our destination guides, how-tos on adventure travel, gear reviews, and more to help you get out and explore more!
Want to Get in Touch? Visit our Contact Page or email me at gstuppycarlson@gmail.com
Gretchen (main voice at Chasing ADVNTR)
Gretchen has over 15 years of experience working with kids and teens in outdoor education and adventure travel. She has worked in the outdoor education world as a Captain and Program Manager aboard tall ships with organizations like Salish Sea Expeditions, Sea Education Association and the Gundalow Company. She is passionate about providing people with experiences that connect them to others, the earth, and themselves. She believes that travel, especially adventure travel, will inspire the next generation of global citizens, leaders, and explorers.
Gretchen is an avid adventurer, currently exploring the world with her own three kids and sharing the experiences and advice of family travel here at Chasing ADVNTR. She loves to climb, hike, backpack, sail, ski, kayak, bike and more! She is the primary voice here on the blog, and does most of the writing and photography.
When she’s not traveling, you can find she is painting and growing flowers in her other small businesses. You can learn more about these on her websites:
Our Story
On a boat in Key West, I first met Dave. It was a fleeting moment, a quick introduction as I boarded a ship for 6 weeks at sea as part of the Sea Education Association college semester program. Two years later, we were re-introduced through his cousin (my college roommate). The timing was in one part terrible as we were both graduating from college and getting ready to go off in different directions and on the other hand, defining for the life we would build together.
For the first 5 years, we dated, we both worked short-term contracts on educationally focused sail training tall ships. Each season would find us moving from boat to boat, teaching leadership, science, and sail training. We both had our US Coast Guard license and worked as Captains, Mates, Deckhands, and Scientists, sometimes together and sometimes apart for months at a time.
Between contracts, we would travel (mostly domestically on a budget) or move somewhere for a few months. We spent 3 months skiing in Breckenridge, 9 months living in Boulder, and 1 month sailing up into British Columbia. Our sailing contracts took us to sea for 3 hours up to 6 weeks up to and down the East and West coast on North America, throughout the Caribbean, and out to Bermuda and out to Tahiti and Hawaii.
When we decided to get married – we imagined we would just strap the kids on our backs and bring them along wherever we went. Our first years of marriage we settled down a bit. We moved to North Carolina, went to graduate school, taught, bought a house, got a dog, and within a year of getting married in 2007, we had twins: Hadley and Fin.
We quickly learned that you absolutely can adventure with young kids, it just looks a bit different! We moved to update New York and then spent 6 months in France when the twins were little where we ate lots of gelato and explored Europe with our 2 year olds.
After our 3rd child (Freja) was born, our travel slowed down for a few years as we worked to pay off student loans and manage 3 kids under 4 at home. We used this time to dive deeper into our other passion to start a large vegetable garden, raise chickens and bees and grow our own fruit trees. When we’re home, we spend a lot of time tending our homestead which now includes goats and a llama when we moved to our current home in NH. We also share about our adventures Backyard Farming.
We are not full-time travelers, although we do have some plans for more extensive travel in the future. This means we’ve worked hard to create systems to balance what we love at home with what we love on the road. It isn’t always easy to have animals and a old farmhouse and commitments and also travel, but a few years ago we recognized that adventure travel was a priority and we made an effort to identify and address the obstacles that were holding us back.
Our biggest obstacles to travel have been finding money to travel, finding time in busy schedules, and caring for our animals while we’re away. By prioritizing travel over other things we’ve helped find more money for travel, maximized our schedule, and set up some amazing housesitters to help take care of our animals when we’re away. By doing this we’ve been to many countries, taken multiple US road trips, and more.
Our kids have grown up with an adventure travel mindset and while they aren’t on board with every adventure we throw out there, they are growing up to be brave, adventurous, and open-minded. Our kids are 13, 13, and 10 now and we still sometimes have tears on hikes, cranky kids, and sibling arguments. But we believe strongly in getting our kids outside and travelling together.
We started this blog at the end of 2021 to share everything we’ve learned about adventure travel with you including our favorite destinations, how-to guides for adventure activities, and gear reviews. I also share some more personal stories about how our family manages adventure travel. In 2021 I left my job as the program manager at a local non-profit, education program aboard a sailboat. Dave currently works in the offshore wind energy sector.
Read exactly How We Plan Adventure Travel.
Start Your Adventure
Follow along with us on Instagram
When I’m not out exploring with my family, you can also find me writing about Backyard Farming from her home in NH or write on Amazing Charcuterie Boards.
