Our plans for parenthood right now can still feel pretty vague, sometimes. We're both determined to be good parents, to raise our kid right, but there's definitely the sense that we'll just have to figure out many of the details as we go along.

One specific that we both agree on now, though, is that we don't intend to let our incipient parenthood slow down our travels. The two of us live fairly low-key lives in many respects, but we tend to take epic vacations. The trick is going to be continuing the pattern.

It's funny, reading places like /r/julybumpers2017 and encountering stories from people irritated at their inlaws for assuming they'd take a six-month-old 150 miles from home for Christmas. Our plan was, and still is, to take our six-month-old to the US this Christmas to spend it with my family: we've been alternating our winter holidays between our families since before we were married, and to us, the arrival of our child only strengthens the reasons to continue this pattern. If our baby has a passport before she has teeth, that's fine with me.

Moving forward a little farther, our tentative plan for the big summer 2018 vacation is to do a road trip: drive to France, through the channel tunnel, then explore England and Scotland before taking a ferry to Scandinavia and south to home. We figure that on travel days, we can cover 400 miles a day, and on non-travel days we can see quite a bit of interesting stuff. It's going to be awesome! It's also going to be something of a challenge, with a one-year-old.

And there's the rub: we've both heard plenty from people who firmly believe that it's just not worth even attempting to do just about anything exciting when you have a baby, let alone take interesting and epic vacations. It's one thing to make grand plans now, before we're even properly into the third trimester; it'll be another thing entirely to actually carry them out. Everyone says that not only is parenthood a transformative event in your life, it's one whose effects can't be predicted in advance. Will we really be able to execute the plans we're making right now?

We'll have to find out, I suppose. I suspect that the answer is yes: Christina and I can both be pretty stubborn, and it's easy to imagine us pushing through a trip even if Olive doesn't really care for the idea in the moment. We're both hoping that she likes travel as much as we do, but we can't know until we try it.

I suppose that's what the answer is, ultimately: whether these trips reveal in Olive a love of travel, or inculcate it, or even inoculate against it, we're going to make the attempt, and find out. If there's one thing we won't do, it's let the fear of the unknown prevent us from doing something good. One way or the other, it's going to be memorable!