Road tripping with my bride and 5 kids is my favorite thing to do. Mom home-schools the kids and I am able to work from anywhere, so traveling and exploring new places is a passion of ours. We are active “home exchange” members, which is an extremely affordable way for our large family to travel. We “swap” homes or use points to visit new locations and truly live as locals.
Our road trips would still happen without Google Maps and the Local Guide program, but thanks to the amazing contribution of local guides across the globe, our “mediocre” road trips are transformed into “epic” road trips. This transformation from mediocre to epic is what the Local Guides program means to me. I am extremely honored to be part of the Local Guides program to help others move from mediocre to epic in their experiences.
Two examples of recent epic family road trips for us included a family ski trip from Texas to New Mexico last month (Feb 2020) and a 48+ hour, 3,200+ mile round trip from Austin, Texas to Toronto, Canada last summer (Jul 2019). Driving cross country with 5 kids is full of challenges, but thanks to local guides along the way, we are able to make plenty of stops at top rated playgrounds, restaurants, hiking spots, museums, you name it. I love taking photos and videos of our adventures, so we can post to our family YouTube channel and social media platforms. This allows us to keep the memories forever and I truly enjoy sharing on Google Maps as a local guide to help the experiences of others as well.
Here is a video recap of our ski trip from Texas to New Mexico. Thanks to local guides in Texas and New Mexico, we had an “epic” trip!
And here is a photo of our 5 kiddos with the Toronto skyline in the background from our Toronto trip last summer.
Here is one of the many stops we made thanks to local guides. We found this amazing art sculpture park right off the highway…perfect for us all to stretch and get some fresh air on our road trip.
Toronto was just one of many destinations on this 20 day epic summer vacation. Here is day 20, which shows many of the stops we were able to make on the ride home from New York to Texas thanks to Google Maps and local guides and their contributions.
All the best my fellow guides. Thanks for being epic!
