One afternoon in Nicaragua, our family was standing on a dock over Laguna de Apoyo. The kids were diving into the water. Jesse was not.
This might surprise people who know him. He’s usually the adventurous one—the one encouraging all of us to try new things, take calculated risks, and stretch ourselves. But on this particular day, he was standing on the dock looking down at the water and deciding that maybe he didn’t actually want to dive in.
“I’ve never really been good at diving,” he said.
Then one of our kids smiled and repeated something we say often in our family:
“Do something every day that scares you.”
His own words, turned right back on him.
There wasn’t much left to say after that. So he went for it.
The first attempt wasn’t pretty. Neither was the second. There may have been some impressive belly flops involved. But eventually he figured it out. As I watched the whole exchange, it struck me that this tiny moment captured something important about how we travel. We don’t always choose the comfortable option. Not because we’re trying to make life harder than it needs to be, but because we’ve found that some of the best parts of travel happen just outside our comfort zones.
Sometimes discomfort is exciting.
In Costa Rica, both of our kids were nervous before we went ziplining. While they had done it once before, they were by no means old pros. Standing on the platform and looking out across the rainforest made everything feel very real.
They were even more nervous when we went canyoning. Rappelling down waterfalls sounds fun when you’re talking about it beforehand. Standing at the top of a waterfall clipped into a rope is a different story. But they did it. And by the end of the day, they were grinning, talking about how much fun it had been, and wanting to do more. Those kinds of discomfort are easy to celebrate. They’re exciting. They make great stories. They’re the moments people take pictures of and tell their friends about afterward.
But travel brings another kind of discomfort too—the less glamorous kind that rarely makes it onto Instagram.
We spent a month in a small town on the coast of Ecuador. There was no air conditioning. The days were hot. The nights were hot. The roosters seemed convinced that 1:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., and 5:00 a.m. were all perfectly reasonable times to announce the start of a new day. Our little casita was open enough that we were constantly sharing space with geckos, ants, and whatever else decided to wander through.
The beach was beautiful, but life wasn’t particularly exciting. Most days looked remarkably similar: beach, lunch, games, walks, repeat. If I’m being honest, there were stretches where all of us felt bored. There were stretches where all of us felt uncomfortable. And then three of us got what we believe was dengue fever, which knocked us flat for over a week and took even longer to fully recover from.
Part of what made Ecuador challenging was that we were truly outsiders. There was another traveling family staying nearby, which was wonderful, but outside of that we rarely encountered anyone who spoke English. Our kids participated in a local program called Niños Libres each morning. Many of the children spoke no English. Our kids spoke very little Spanish. Communication wasn’t easy.
Some days they came back frustrated. Some days they didn’t want to go. But they kept going. They learned to navigate uncertainty. They learned that relationships don’t always require perfect communication. They learned that being uncomfortable doesn’t mean something is wrong. Sometimes it just means you’re growing.
None of that was fun in the moment. But looking back, I don’t regret any of it.
What surprised me most happened after we got home. A month or so later, we were talking about our trip, and our older son mentioned that our month in Ecuador had been one of his favorite parts of the entire 2.5 months.
I was genuinely surprised. This was the place where we were hot all the time. The place where there wasn’t a long list of exciting activities. The place where life was slow, repetitive, and sometimes uncomfortable.
But as we talked more, I realized he wasn’t remembering the heat or the boredom. He was remembering the beach, the games we played together, the people we met, and the simple rhythm of our days.
It was a good reminder that kids often experience travel differently than adults. Sometimes the things that seem least impressive in the moment are the things that stick with them the longest.
One of my favorite travel memories from the entire trip came later in the Galápagos. We were taking a speedboat between islands in rough seas. Jesse and our older son were sitting in the back of the boat getting absolutely drenched by seawater for nearly two hours. They were soaked, cold, and shivering. Meanwhile, our younger son and I had the opposite problem. We were in the enclosed upper section where the air barely moved. It felt like an oven, and our younger son was seasick.
Nobody would have described that boat ride as comfortable.
At one point Jesse kept repeating the same phrase to our older son:
“This too shall pass.”
It’s become one of our favorite family mantras. Not because it makes difficult moments disappear, but because it reminds us that discomfort is temporary. Cold passes. Heat passes. Seasickness passes. Fear passes. Even the hard parts eventually become stories.
People sometimes assume that travel is one long series of amazing experiences, and sometimes it is. But travel can also be frustrating, hot, cold, uncomfortable, exhausting, and confusing—sometimes all in the same day. The question isn’t whether discomfort will show up. It will. The question is whether the things on the other side of that discomfort are worth it.
For us, the answer is almost always yes.
Because on the other side of the language barrier is connection. On the other side of uncertainty is confidence. On the other side of fear is growth. And on the other side of discomfort is often a deeper understanding of both the world and ourselves.
One of the reasons travel is such a powerful form of education for our family is that it teaches lessons that are difficult to replicate in more controlled environments. Not every challenge needs to be solved immediately. Not every uncomfortable feeling needs to be avoided. Not every hard experience is bad.
Sometimes growth comes because of discomfort. Sometimes it comes in spite of discomfort. And sometimes the discomfort itself is the lesson.
We still like comfortable things. We enjoy air conditioning when it’s blazing hot. We enjoy smooth boat rides. We enjoy getting a good night’s sleep. But we don’t believe comfort should always be the goal.
Some of the most meaningful experiences of our lives have started with the decision to do something that felt just a little uncomfortable—even if it meant a few belly flops along the way.
