Planes, Canes, and Automobiles

Connecting with Your Aging Parents through Travel

Valerie M. Grubb

If the thought of vacationing with your parents makes you cringe, fear no more! Help is here!

Planes, Canes, and Automobiles: Connecting with Your Aging Parents through Travel is a gold mine of practical advice, funny anecdotes, and tales of triumphs and travails from Val Grubb, who has traveled more than 300,000 miles (and counting!) with her 84-year old mother over the past twenty years.

When planning a recent trip overseas, however, Grubb realized that her mom’s physical and mental capabilities had suddenly changed. Her mom now needed a wheelchair, for example, and was afraid to travel alone (even on short flights to meet her daughter for a long trip together). Grubb set out to find suggestions for handling these changes and after much research was struck by the lack of resources to help people plan vacations with an aging friend or family member. She couldn’t find any comprehensive information that shed light on the nuances of globetrotting with aging parents.

Valerie Grubb’s father was a pilot, so she was born with travel in her blood. She began traveling solo at the tender age of four (when she wandered out of eyesight of her house one day), and since then she has continued to make exploring the world a priority while pursuing careers in both operations management and executive coaching. Val and her mom, Dorothy, took their first overseas vacation together when Dorothy was sixty-four, and in the more than twenty years since then, they have logged over 300,000 miles (and counting!). In response to the lack of available resources on the subject of seniors traveling with their adult children, Val began publishing Travel with Aging Parents (www.travelwithagingparents.com) in 2013, a blog that chronicles the triumphs (and challenges) of intergenerational travel with Val’s signature “you-can-do-this” flair.