Travels
The Ice family walking a Maui beach toward the camera at golden hour

Not travel agents · Just obsessed

We're a little obsessed with the family trip.

A family travel journal out of Fort Worth. We plan the trips we wished someone had planned for us — then hand you the whole plan: where we stayed, what we'd skip, every booking link, and the photography to make you want to go.

Browse the field reportsWork with us
Wherever the light's good

Hi, we're the Ices

We plan our whole year around the next trip.

Jamey does the obsessive research and carries the camera. Melissa makes a real itinerary survivable with a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old in tow. We've been at this for eighteen years — Santa Fe weekends, three weeks across Italy, and a lot of boarding passes in between.

Ice Travels is where we write the trips down — scored, photographed, the skips marked — so yours doesn't start from a blank page.

Meet the family →
The whole Ice family on the golden wildflower drive at their Santa Fe casaThe Ices, est. 2008
The girls walking a cobblestone street in Italy
Florence · Italy
Jamey carrying a daughter on the Seceda ridge, the Dolomites
Seceda · Dolomites
The kids swimming at a villa pool on a summer trip
Lago di Garda · Italy

What you'll find here

Everything we wish we'd had before our first big trip.

No. 01

Field Reports

Every place, scored the same way every time. Where we stayed, the one thing you can't skip — and the part most guides leave out: what we'd skip.

Read the reports →

No. 02

The Guides

Deep-dive PDFs — the day-by-day we actually ran, every address and booking link, the kid logistics. Most are free for an email; the travel-hacking playbook is the one we charge for.

Browse the guides →Start here

No. 03

Travel Hacking

How we fly the family in lie-flat seats and sleep in suites for a fraction of the price. The whole system — cards, sweet spots, the upgrade email that always works — is in one guide.

Get the guide →
9
Field reports, one rubric
16
Destinations mapped
18
Years on the road
Hundreds
Trips home to Santa Fe
The Ice kids wading into a lake at dusk

Why we don't wait

The kids are this age once.

Eighteen summers with them under our roof — and we're already past half.
Worth the trouble, every time

Why we don't wait

Three reasons we stopped waiting.

The math that turned someday into booked.

  1. It's the one thing you buy that makes you richer.

    Not the photos. The kid who orders in Italian, the dinner you still talk about, the way a place rearranges what you thought you knew. That compounds.

  2. “When they're older” is a trap.

    There's no perfect age. There's the age they are now. Little kids travel better than anyone warns you — they just need a parent who planned for the meltdown before it happened.

  3. The window is shorter than it looks.

    We stopped waiting for the money, the timing, the someday. We go now and figure out the rest. So far, the rest has always worked out.

The Ice Travels standard

Every place we go gets the same honest read.

Not a highlight reel. A field report — scored the same way every time, so you know exactly what you're getting before you book. Where we stayed. The one thing you can't skip. And the part most guides won't tell you: what we'd skip.

Field Report

No. 01

Santa Fe New Mexico, USA

Worth the flight.

Coordinates
35.6870° N, 105.9378° W
Traveled
Every season
Kid-readiness
Built for it. Meow Wolf, pottery painting, private hot tubs, and waterfall hikes the little legs can finish.
Where we stayed
Our own place — Casa de Ice or Casa de Camino, just off Old Las Vegas Hwy.
The non-negotiable
A private hot-tub session at Ten Thousand Waves after a mountain hike, then karaage at Izanami. A family tradition.
What we'd skip
Nothing in town is a trap. But the Loretto Chapel staircase is a 15-minute stop, not an afternoon.
Best season
Fall, when the aspens turn gold at the top of the ski basin. We go year-round, snow included.
Points & hacking
Fly into Santa Fe (SAF), or Albuquerque (ABQ, ~50 min south) and pair it with the Sandia Peak tram.
Ghost Ranch horses at golden hour, Santa Fe35.6870° N, 105.9378° W
Santa Fe — frame 2Santa Fe — frame 3

The map so far

Where we've been.

9 reports are live now — from Santa Fe to Rome to the Mexican Caribbean. The next few are already shot and written — Lake Garda, Tuscany, 30A, New Orleans, Paris, St. Croix — waiting on the final read, with a deeper bench filing in behind them.

Santa Fe, New Mexico
No. 01

Santa Fe

Worth the flight

New Mexico

Florence, Tuscany, Italy
No. 02

Florence

Worth the flight

Tuscany, Italy

The Dolomites, South Tyrol
No. 03

The Dolomites

Worth the flight

South Tyrol

Provence, France
No. 04

Provence

Worth the flight

France

Maui, Hawaii
No. 05

Maui

Worth the flight

Hawaii

Rome, Lazio, Italy
No. 06

Rome

Worth the detour

Lazio, Italy

Sestri Levante, Liguria, Italy
No. 07

Sestri Levante

Worth the flight

Liguria, Italy

Gaeta & Sperlonga, Lazio Coast, Italy
No. 08

Gaeta & Sperlonga

Worth the detour

Lazio Coast, Italy

Akumal & Tulum, Riviera Maya, Mexico
No. 09

Akumal & Tulum

Worth the flight

Riviera Maya, Mexico

Lake Garda, Italy
Writing it up

Lake Garda

Italy

Tuscany, Cortona, Italy
Guide's ready

Tuscany

Cortona, Italy

30A, Florida
Still sandy

30A

Florida

New Orleans, Louisiana
In the field

New Orleans

Louisiana

Paris, France
Arguing the verdict

Paris

France

St. Croix, U.S.V.I.
Drying off

St. Croix

U.S.V.I.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Still thawing out

Jackson Hole

Wyoming

Casa de Ice, the family's adobe estate at golden hour outside Santa Fe
Santa Fe · New Mexico

Stay with us · Santa Fe

We don't just visit Santa Fe. We host there.

It's our favorite city on earth — where Jamey's grandparents lived for thirty years and we keep finding our way back. Casa de Ice and Casa de Camino are ours: two of the top-performing rentals in the area, huge gorgeous estates ten to fifteen minutes from the Plaza, with the mountains for a backyard. Same eye we bring to the reports, pointed at where you sleep.

See the houses

How we afford it

We mostly fly free. Here's how.

Credit-card points are the closest thing to a cheat code we've found, and most people leave them on the table. We wrote down the whole system — the cards in order, the sweet spots, the email that's gotten us a suite almost every time — in one guide.

Points, not paychecks

We fly the family on transferable points — the right cards, the right transfer partners, the sweet-spot redemptions most people never find.

Trade homes, skip hotels

Home Exchange and ThirdHome turn an empty week into a free villa. We've stayed in places we could never have booked, for the cost of cleaning.

Kids change the math

Lap infants, free-night certificates, family suites that sleep four on points — traveling with kids isn't the obstacle. It's the opening.

Get the guide

Hotels, brands & tourism boards

We make the content people actually want to publish.

Pro-grade photography and real family footage, with full usage rights, edited to your property's look. Host us, and leave with a library you can use — not just a tagged post.

See what we offer
The Ice kids on a Lake Garda dock — the kind of real travel content the Ices make
One of the Ice girls running down the beach toward the water at dusk

No itinerary for this part

We're not getting this time back.

So we book the trip, take the photo, and let the laundry wait. The list is free — come do the same.

Start with a field report

Free to download

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New field reports the day we publish them, plus the living version of our points playbook — the cards and sweet spots we're running right now. No spam; we're too busy traveling.