Traveling in itself is a beautiful thing.  But when you travel with your kids, the experience is taken to new heights entirely.  Anna, the author of Mommy Poppins (New York) is an expert at centering activities around children.  Her website, Mommy Poppins Travel, is geared toward showing the public how travel is the perfect way to enrich your life as well as the lives of your little ones while simultaneously constructing memories that last a lifetime.  In addition, Anna sheds light on how travel brings fresh perspective to the world around you.  It forces you to look at the same aspect from different viewpoints, thus helping in growth, learning, and development.  Tours4Fun had the incredible opportunity to interview this fabulous writer/mom and we’d like to share some of her words of wisdom and insight with you! 

Tours4Fun: It is wonderful that so much of your blog content incorporates and is based around activities to partake in with your kids.  Tell us why traveling with kids is so valuable and in what ways it differs from traveling alone.
Anna: Mommy Poppins is all about doing things with your kids that do more than just pass the afternoon, but are enriching and create memories and valuable experiences together as a family. Travel is one of the best activities for doing that. When you travel you are exposing your children to things outside of their normal world. Whether they get to experience a different culture or just get to see things differently because they are away from home, travel always gives you the opportunity to grow, learn and create amazing family memories.
Tours4Fun: Most of your blogs parallel current events, and what’s happening at the time.  They aren’t randomized.  How is this approach to blogging more beneficial to you than any other?
Anna: I think this stemmed from me, personally, being pretty much a last minute planner. One of my very early, but still popular annual posts is called the Slacker Mom Camp Guide and we post it just a few weeks before camp starts and it tells parents which camps still have spots.
I live in the moment, and do as much as I can for what’s going on right now and then only look to the next thing when I’ve wrung everything out of that. I never really thought about it much, but I guess that  kind of permeates all our sites. Maybe because all parents tend to live in the present; that’s just how it is with kids.

Tours4Fun: What have you found to be the most challenging part about traveling abroad?
Anna: I think the expense of flying keeps a lot of people from being able to have the amazing experience of traveling abroad with their families, which is really too bad. For one person to fly you can suck up an expensive ticket, but multiply that by 4 or 5 and, yikes, we’re talking a huge investment.
Tours4Fun: On your blog, you seem to promote many other companies.  Why is it crucial to cross promote?
Anna: We are very supportive of local businesses. There are lots of great little places that are offering amazingly creative opportunities for kids, or even public institutions like museums that offer very high quality free programs. When I started the site these programs were really not broadly promoted and so it became somewhat of a mission for me to help more parents know about these things.
Tours4Fun: How do you stay so up-to-date on everything in areas outside of your hometown?
Anna: Everything written on the sites is written by local moms or, for travel pieces, trips we’ve personally taken. That’s very important to me. We are not just pushing press releases. We pass on information we think is really valuable, things we’ve experienced ourselves with our families or have heard are exceptional from other parents.

Tours4Fun: How do you manage to balance family life along with up keeping your blog?
Anna: In some ways I’m not sure that I have. For five years I have worked feverishly on the site because I was just really passionate about it. But on the other hand I was able to do that work from my living room as opposed to when I worked in advertising for 80 hours a week and wasn’t home. So it gives me a little bit more flexibility, but having your kids see you working all the time as opposed to you being “at work” has its own challenges.
Tours4Fun: According to you, how important is it for a person to travel and experience a place outside of their own backyard, and why?
Anna: I have traveled abroad and I have also lived abroad, as well as traveling and living in different places in the US and, for me, the most powerful thing about it is that it gives you incredible perspective on your normal life. You see your own life in a different way and lots of things you may take for granted seem much more important.
Tours4Fun: What do you look forward to the most when visiting a new area?
Anna: The food. I love to go someplace and live like a local, so I love to go to the food markets and then take ingredients home and cook. Or trying different restaurants and local specialties. For me, the food is always the biggest adventure.
Tours4Fun: Sometimes, people are hesitant to travel to places where they don’t quite know the language.  Do you have any words of advice for these people?
Anna: I find travel anticipation the scariest part. Once you are there things don’t seem so daunting. English is becoming fairly universal. I have definitely left places in tears because of inability to communicate, but that was in Eastern Europe right after the wall came down and almost no one spoke English and they just weren’t used to foreigners at all. Now most places are much more worldly.

Tours4Fun: Lastly, on your blog you have a section for “Kids Bucket List.”  What’s on your bucket list?
Anna: We have bucket lists for all of our cities and regions and then on the travel site we have bucket list posts with the best things to do in tons of different destinations. I love going new places. I am definitely not a return to the same vacation spot every year type of gal. But there are so many parts of the world I’ve never been to. I’ve never been to any part of Asia or Africa or South America, so I have a lot of the world still to explore, but I’m hoping that will change very soon. And I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with our readers on Mommy Poppins Travel.