Parenting vs travel writing | Yorkshire invitation | Baubles nominations
Carolyn Boyd shares her challenging reality of parenting while travel writing
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In the meantime, we’ve got a new webinar to announce with Meera Dattani — details below!
In this travel writing webinar, four freelance journalists will share their hacks, tips and best-practice for making freelancing work better. ‘Time is money’ for a freelancer, so if you streamline and power up the way you work, pitch, travel, write, and manage your business, you may feel more motivated, productive and, ultimately, generate more income.
Now — onto this month’s series: we’re talking about parents. Specifically, how they make travel writing and parenting work. We’re kicking off with some realness from Carolyn Boyd, the author of Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France, whose experience is something many parents will recognise, I’m sure.
REMINDER: The Baubles nominations are closing on 13 September so get your nominations in now!
Like many of us with a deep sense of wanderlust, I swore that having children would never change my desire to see the world and pursue the fascinating stories I loved to write. When I fell pregnant with my daughter, my attitude was simply ‘I’ll just take her along, how hard could it be?’ It turned out, two weeks after her birth, that taking her on the local bus to town was as nerve-wracking as my previous white-water rafting experience on the River Zambezi.
While our family trips over the years have fallen somewhere between those two poles of ambition, the combination of children — her brother arrived 2.5 years later — and travel writing has inevitably curbed our adventurous spirit, but so too has it led to experiences we would never have had without them. Now 13 and 11, I look back on the halcyon days when they were small and the nights we spent in zoos, in treehouses and even a cow-shaped eco-lodge with fondness. These forays were made possible thanks to my then-job as editor of France Magazine, which allowed me to develop my specialism.
My transition into freelancing coincided with my daughter starting school, and with both new scenarios came a whole new set of challenges. Placing family-led features is much harder than those stories that can be done alone. The readers of magazines such as National Geographic Traveller or Wanderlust are more intrepid and want more challenging trips or destinations than France or ‘glamping on a farm’. Therefore, I more often pitch family stories to newspapers, which run features you’d class as ‘holidays’ rather than ‘travel’.
Once both children had started school, I took to travelling solo more frequently. To make it possible, my parents (and in earlier years, my in-laws before my father-in-law developed dementia) would often come and stay to help with the school runs and cooking meals, which they were happy to do. We have a good local network of fellow parents for playdate swaps and since the pandemic, my husband Toby has worked from home, which has made my trips easier to manage between us. Toby and I share the household duties 50/50, but he would step in to do more to allow me to go away; sometimes through gritted teeth, but more often in the knowledge that I do the same when his work gets busy or when he is taking part in a play at the local theatre. For everything, we act as a team, pooling our finances and never straying into ‘it’s not fair’ territory.
After 18 months of full-time freelancing, I was delighted to accept a part-time job as PR & Communications Manager of The Roux Scholarship, as it had become abundantly clear that it was just too hard to do enough trips for the number of stories required to make any money. I love the job as much as the freelancing; the role is rewarding and I work with some incredible people, the teamwork counters the solitude of writing. It also means I have a small regular salary all year round. The hardest part about it is that it is in a completely different sector (chefs and UK hospitality), so it is like leading a double life, neither job knowing how demanding the other is, and I need to have my ear to the ground for news in two different subjects.
Since taking the role and having a regular income, it has been possible to combine the three responsibilities — family, job, freelancing — and we’ve had some extraordinary experiences together we would never have had otherwise. The flipside is that I turn down countless commissions because there isn’t enough time to do them alongside the job and family and I often feel the sting of seeing those stories under other writers’ bylines.
The added challenge is that because our trips need to be in the school holidays, they almost always cost more to do than I earn from the story fee, but my husband and I feel they are worth doing; our experiences in France will inevitably be more adventurous than what we can afford (ie. e campsite in Wales). And every experience I have in France adds to my expertise and bank of stories that can be sold later, which justifies the initial cost.
For our trips in the summer holidays, we’ve frequently booked a large Airbnb or gîte with its own pool to share with my parents, my sister and her family, and split the cost (my parents very generously pay a third). The kids are happy with their cousins in the pool and garden, we can share the cost of the house and food, and I have a base for quick trips out to research different stories both for features and for my recently published book Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France.
Writing the book allowed me to channel the deeper knowledge I have for France’s food — but also its landscape and geography, culture and history — into a project of my own design. In reality, it was a ‘fourth’ job, squeezed in around the rest, because I still needed to do freelance articles to get tourist boards’ support for my trips. It has meant for an insane two years, but I’m deeply proud of it and hope it will open more doors for writing in other publications and on other subjects, such as food and society and the environment.
As for combining family and travel, with the teens and pre-teens upon us now, a gîte and pool doesn’t quite hold enough appeal. So the challenge now is to find story ideas that will appeal both to editors and the family, and which might get support from tourist boards or tour operators.
Or perhaps the answer is to stop trying to combine the two — it is stressful enough trying to drag two reluctant offspring around a tourist attraction they have no interest in without also having to do all the necessary groundwork for a feature. The question is, can I earn enough to pay for an actual holiday? Camping in Wales might just have to do.
Fancy a wander in Yorkshire?
As part of their 40th anniversary celebrations, walking specialists Inntravel is hosting a net-walking session in Yorkshire. Join one of Inntravel’s Product Managers and MD, Emma Gray, for a hike up Ingleborough followed by a pub lunch, all while chatting more about Inntravel’s range of self-guided walking holidays, and what they have coming up in 2025 and beyond. Contact Hugh Collins at JSPR for more details: juliaspence.pr@gmail.com
Tweet of the week
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For those of you still on The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, Nick Jackson is back at the helm of Atlas Obscura.
Industry must-reads
I’ve (Lottie) just finished listening to the audiobook of Tourists by Lucy Lethbridge. It’s a fascinating charting of the history behind British tourism at home and abroad.
This piece on AI and holiday scams in The Telegraph is a must-read for anyone who pays their own way.
We love this piece on decolonizing the mountains in Canada on Adventure.com.
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What a lovely, honest post from Carolyn. I'm past the stage of juggling work and childcare, but the issue of 'how can I earn enough to pay for an ACTUAL holiday' really resonates with me. I've had a wonderful summer attending loads of classical music festivals around the UK and one in Estonia, but even with the travel and accommodation costs covered for two of them I haven't made a profit, or even managed to land commissions for writing about all of them. So many 'thanks but no thanks, budget won't stretch' answers from editors, even though the topics are completely relevant and no other journalists were there. But I still feel I would rather be doing this than sitting at home writing features that can be researched via a combination of Google and Zoom.