Fort Worth, Texas · a family of four
How it started
Jamey and Melissa Ice have been married since 2008. They live in Fort Worth's Near Southside with their daughters Rosie and Justice, who joined their family through adoption — and who got their first passports before they could spell the word.
Between building businesses back home, the thing the Ices actually save for is the next trip. Not stuff. Not a bigger house. Time, together, somewhere new. Jamey goes deep on the research and carries the camera; Melissa makes a real itinerary survivable with little kids. Somewhere along the way the planning got good enough that friends started asking for it. So we started writing it down.
Ice Travels is that — our actual trips, the skips and the splurges marked, for anyone who'd rather travel well than wing it.
The crew
Same rubric we score destinations with — pointed at ourselves. Here's who's on the trip.
Ice TravelsThe planner & the camera
@jameyice
Ice TravelsThe one who makes it work
@melissaice
Ice TravelsThe big sister (Roosevelt, officially)
Ice TravelsSmallest, loudest — a.k.a. JJ
The last few years
When we're not on a plane
Travel is the thing we love most, but it's not all we do. Most of the year we're building things at home — and a lot of what makes us good at planning trips (the eye, the obsessing over details, the why-not-us nerve) comes straight from that work.
Jamey's Fort Worth firm — renovating and reimagining houses, 120-plus high-end remodels in. The same design eye that frames every photo here.
The two luxury homes we own and operate in Santa Fe — boutique hospitality we run ourselves. See the Stay page.
The anti-trafficking nonprofit Melissa founded in Fort Worth — the work closest to her heart.
Melissa's social enterprise — candles and jewelry handmade by women coming out of trafficking.
The Fort Worth band Jamey toured and charted with for years before the houses and the kids.
Jamey's podcast — long conversations about the stories that shape people, under the 6th Ave Storytelling banner.
Ice Travels is the travel corner of all that. For the rest — the work, the writing, the coaching — it lives at theices.net.
Visit theices.netWhy we bother writing it down
We've had trips saved by one tip from a friend who'd been there — and trips half-wasted because we didn't have it. The research we do for our own family is the research most people never have time for. So we give it away (and sell the deep stuff cheap), with the skips and the splurges marked. Travel that's actually doable with a family in tow. That's the whole mission.
