Want to know about us?
Sure! Why not?! We are Chris and Rob Taylor, 2TravelDads, and we’re all about taking our sons out into the world and experiencing it as an LGBTQ family, learning about culture, having great food, and playing in the sand.
Together we run the original, the first gay family travel blog. Yes, our site was indeed the first LGBTQ family travel blog but we’re excited to share that more Dads and more Moms are starting to share their experiences and recommendations too, which rocks!!
Press statement (because people ask for bio quotes sometimes): Rob Taylor is the founder and lead journalist for 2TravelDads.com, the original LGBT family travel blog. Focusing on travel as a form of education, 2TravelDads showcases brands and destinations that are ideal for families of all kinds. Partnering with brands such as IHG, Universal, VISIT FLORIDA, Amtrak and more, 2TravelDads create content for their own channels as well as branded media for partners.
Rob Taylor has released two published books: The Road Trip Survival Guide and The Ultimate Travel Journal for Kids, launched a web series with Best Western Hotels & Resorts, and engaged several speaking engagements around the USA over the years. The future for Rob Taylor and 2TravelDads includes expanding the blog and publishing two more books in the Road Trip Survival Guide series.
2TravelDads’ Mission Statement
Our mission is to normalize non-traditional families and promote acceptance of loving, caring people no matter the family makeup.
Our goal is to encourage families like ours to be visible in the world, traveling beyond their comfort zone in safety, and to pave the way for the next generation of LGBTQ people to be confident is creating the family that’s right for them wherever they are.
Who are 2TravelDads?
Chris and I (I’m Rob, Hi!) have been together for 16 years. We’ve been legally married since 2013. Before kids we were just another couple exploring the world, but now with our little dudes we’re 2TravelDads… and we keep on traveling and now we share everything via our LGBT family travel blog.
Check out our visit to Seattle’s King 5 New Day Northwest to talk about starting the blog and writing a book!
We contribute to a variety of blogs and news outlets, and have been featured by GaysWithKids, Gay Star News and Yonderbound. The Huffington Post listed us as one of the “world’s top male travel bloggers”. We also write for Twist Travel Magazine and a variety of other publications that enjoy our voice and perspective. We’re based in North Florida, but our next stop: everywhere else.
What else do you want to know about 2TravelDads or Rob Taylor as an author?
Check out our brand and destination partnerships to see a little more about how we operate.
Before the LGBT family travel blog life
Together, Chris and I have traveled through Europe, Mexico, the US and Canada. And we’ve through Asia and the Caribbean separately a few times. We’re not fancy, but when the opportunity presents itself, we definitely opt for a posh hotel with a nice pool over “old world charm”. We will deal with a scary room in a pinch. We will camp in odd places. Funny to think back to our early, or even our first, travels together and see how we’ve changed what we’re up for. Our very first trip was a road trip to San Francisco (of course) and it was full of fun stops and creepy motels.
Since then, we have upped our standards a bit and are much better and travel planning and finding real gems in unexpected places. And now, running an awesome LGBTQ family travel blog like we do, we’ve got to work even harder to find surprising, delightful hotels and activities. I mean, we’ve got to keep our kids entertained and learning on the road, right? We’re not afraid of taking our kids on adventures and sharing that via our LGBTQ family travel blog.
When the two dads are at home
We’re fortunate that our jobs have us together as a family nearly all the time, working from home or on the road together. We each have our responsibilities for maintaining and growing 2TravelDads, but there’s more to us than that (even though running the coolest gay dad travel blog on earth is a full time job).
In the past we’ve homeschooled the kids and been active in their school when enrolled. Because we feel that the education offered by traveling and being IN the world is often greater than what small kids will take from a classroom, we’ve made the decision to travel as much as possible while the kids are small and still interested in hanging out with us. We are clear in communicating with the kids’ teachers about our time together and on the road, and are sure to have their support as we keep venturing out as a family.
We supplement our education via travel with approved structured curricula, but our focus, and what we aim to share through our family travel blog, is real-life education and gaining a broad world view via travel. There’s something to be said about a tried and true education through a school though, so keep tuned for developments in our world-schooling journey.
How the Pandemic Has Effected Us
Before the pandemic hit in 2020 our family had been in the process of relocating from the Seattle area to North Florida. We’d been looking at homes and actually were under contract, ready to list our house and make the move. Then the world shut down overnight. Buying and selling a house is stressful enough, but add to it the uncertainty of actually securing a place to live at a time when every facet of American business hit a deadlock and it was unimaginable.
Unsure if our bank was going to stop our buying process, and then not knowing if the people buying our house were facing the same roadblocks and delays that we were having in getting our new house, we just had to keep pressing on.
We’d arranged to have our cross-country relocation be a part of a work project (I work in travel) but that got cancelled days before our departure… because hotels were closing everywhere. We now didn’t have anywhere to sleep on a 3000 mile drive across the USA. Luckily we were able to buy a camping trailer and got it two days before we had to leave. That seemed like a good plan, but then we couldn’t get campground reservations anywhere because camping was also shut down. We still had to leave though.
The day before we left, we loaded up in the car and drove to say goodbye to our parents, goodbye from afar without hugging, driving off crying.
We packed up the kids and the cat, our camper trailer full of canned and dry goods and left our home. It was bizarre and surreal. On the drive out of our driveway we were calling around, trying to find places to stay along our route. After explaining our situation to several campground owners we were able to find a place to stay on our first night… and then our second and third. Eventually we got all six nights sorted, including sleeping in a friend’s driveway in Texas.
The whole drive from Seattle, WA to Saint Augustine, FL we only interacted with two people. When we got to our new home in Florida, we received our keys as scheduled, which we really didn’t think would happen.
Each day of our drive the news got worse and worse, and stories of things shutting down made us beyond anxious. Seeing tourist towns, like Moab, UT boarded up with nobody anywhere and trying to make stops along the way to lighten the doomsday mood of the most depressing road trip ever, it was a lot to take in each day.
Even upon getting to our new home and feeling safe and secure, we still had to live on the edge. Pandemic delays made for our belongings to be long in getting to us, so we spent a month in sleeping bags on our concrete floors. We ate dinner on our makeshift kitchen table sitting in camping chairs. The beach in our neighborhood was closed, so we couldn’t even enjoy our new town.
Now it’s a year later. We’ve got our beds, the kids have started in-person school, we walk to the beach and go kayaking. We’ve had family come visit and we’ve got the practice of quarantining down. We’re vaccinated.
And writing this, this is the first time I’ve looked back on any of this and cried. I think that a year of living in uncertainty and adjusting to everything in our world being completely new has finally come to a head.
I look forward to things continuing to improve, to case numbers dropping daily, and to going out in public without feeling judged for still wearing a mask. And most of all I look forward to our kids getting to live their lives again, full of hugs and without masks and plexiglass dividers as school. I can see it happening soon, and I will be so thankful when it does.
Questions for the two dads
Please feel free to reach out or comment on our articles and social media. We’ll do our best to respond in a timely manner, but remember, we have other lives to watch over which may delay follow up. We’ll keep our super awesome LGBT family travel blog updated and serving out quality content as best and more effectively as we can, but that’s always going to come second to being dads and taking care of family life first.