Andrea Cosgrave – Family Travel & Making Memories

In the early spring of 2020, Andrea Cosgrave set up a travel account on Instagram. She had been thinking about it for a couple of years and had never quite pressed the button on it. What decided her was a trip. The family were booked to go to Iceland over the Saint Patrick’s weekend and she wanted somewhere to put the photographs.

The trip was cancelled. So was everything else.

She was left with a brand new account, no holiday, and a phone full of older ones. So she posted those instead, and Next Stop with Kids has been going ever since. Somewhere past twenty countries later, most of them with three children in tow, she came in to talk to Florence about how a family of five actually gets out the door.

Sausages and chips, out the country

Andrea was born in Sligo and reared just outside Boyle, one of four, and all four of them have ended up back in the town. She and Florence went through the National School and the secondary school together and were in the first Leaving Cert year of the new school, which meant they spent their last years in the old building wearing a uniform nobody else had.

Florence remembers the birthday parties. Fifteen or twenty in the house, which was a crowd in those days, and Andrea’s mother putting out sausages and chips when the rest of Boyle was handing round sweets and a slice of cake. Andrea says she still does not know how her mother managed it.

The sleepovers get more airtime than anything else in the first ten minutes. They were making up girl bands and copying dance routines off the television. Andrea’s description of it is that they were “TikTokers before TikTok”, and she is thankful nobody had a phone in the room.

There is a photograph that surfaced recently of the whole class on the last day of primary school, arms around each other, standing the way a girl band stands. Andrea still has the shirt they all signed. It is in her mother’s house, she says, because she is not a hoarder.

They were not travellers

None of this looked like it was heading anywhere near Bangkok. Andrea and Damien got together young and settled quickly, and while everyone around them was heading for Australia they were getting jobs and getting on with it. Damien had been outside the country once before they met. Their first trip was Bulgaria, which Andrea bought him for his 21st, picked from a travel agent’s catalogue on the strength of one photograph of the front of a hotel.

They got engaged in Vegas and married in 2012. Cara arrived and the holidays were sun loungers in Lanzarote with granny and granddad and the aunts and uncles, a week of not doing very much.

What changed it was not ambition. It was shift work. Andrea and Damien worked opposite each other on purpose, so that one of them was always at home with Cara, which meant that the only stretch of the year the whole house was in the same place at the same time was a holiday.

So they booked another one. And then another. Riley and Caoimhe arrived and the trips got more frequent, not less, which as Florence points out is the wrong way round. The trips were “something to look forward to”, Andrea says, and a way of getting the five of them into the same room.

Florida came next, over and over, because America was easy once you got there. Getting there was the problem. Andrea describes a 9 hour flight with two small children as an adventure to be lived through rather than experienced.

The hours nobody sees

Andrea is careful not to make the account sound like a job or a calling. She started it because she loves photographs, and because posting holiday pictures on her private account felt like bombarding people who had not asked for them. A separate travel account seemed tidier. If you are not interested, you do not follow it.

She had it set up for a while before she published a single thing.

“Even now I’m still completely out of my comfort zone with it.”

The move from photographs to video changed the work entirely. She is blunt about how much of it there is and how little of it shows. People do not realise, she says, “how many hours goes into actually creating all of that”, and that is before you count the recording.

She goes quiet between trips because she has nothing to say between trips, and the algorithm takes its pound of flesh for that. She will come back with a good video from a good holiday and nobody will see it. There are weeks she is ready to delete the app off the phone altogether.

Her three children are split on the whole thing, which she talks about openly. Cara, who is almost 18, wants nothing to do with it. Riley was happy in front of a camera and is pulling back now that he is heading into the teenage years. Caoimhe still loves it.

Andrea says she would not want anyone putting that pressure on her, so she is not putting it on them. Nothing on the page is staged either. It is her standing in the background with a camera while they get on with whatever they are doing, and the only complaint out of them is the occasional posed photograph.

Hard at home or hard in the sunshine

The question Andrea gets most is how she manages it with three at all.

“It’s hard to be at home with 3 kids. It’s also hard to be away with 3 kids.”

If both are hard, she would rather it was hard somewhere warm. She thinks seven or eight is the sweet spot: independent enough that you are not minding them every second, young enough that they still want to be involved. And she has no patience for the idea that small children are the obstacle.

“Let me tell you now that it is much easier to travel with small kids than it is to travel with teenagers.”

She does not take much credit for her own three being good travellers. They have been going since they were small, so they know no different, and they get on with it the way a child who has been brought to restaurants knows how to sit in a restaurant.

The catch is that the children set the pace, and no spreadsheet survives that.

The spreadsheet, and the plugs

Andrea plans. It is a running joke in the house that she is the spreadsheet traveller, and she does not deny it. Every big trip gets plotted out to the last detail, which areas are near which, what order things go in. She also knows before she leaves that she will not get through half of it, and that is fine. The spreadsheet is a best case scenario, not a schedule.

There is so much information available now, she reckons, that you have “nearly been on the trip before you even go on the trip”, and that alone can be the thing that decides whether you go somewhere or not.

The practical bits, for anyone taking notes. Check the passports even when you are certain they are fine, because Andrea was certain and found out at the check in desk that Riley’s was out of date. She reckons every family gets that morning exactly once and never again. She uses Google Flights with the dates fixed and the destination left open, or the destination fixed and the dates left open, and goes wherever the value is.

For hotels, the trick that saves the most money: search booking.com for two adults and two children rather than two and three, which brings up far more options, then go to the bottom of the hotel page and add an extra bed or email and ask.

She travels light on the basis that you can buy anything anywhere. Passport and phone and she is sorted. Except the plugs. She has never once remembered the plugs.

She is also, and this surprised Florence, a nervous flyer. She hates it. She pays more for the bigger airlines because she has decided some of them are safer than others, and she is the first to say that makes no sense.

Crocodile, scorpion, and a very dear McDonald’s

Thailand in 2024 is the trip she comes back to. Bangkok, Koh Samui, Phuket, and Khao Sok National Park, which she calls the highlight of the whole thing and the worst part of it in the same breath. They planned it off other people’s advice rather than off the internet, and then abandoned the planning entirely once they were there, working out the next leg the night before, taking private transfers that cost about the same as public transport once you were paying for five.

They had worried about the food. They needn’t have. There was Western food everywhere, and the children ate crocodile and scorpion and thought it was hilarious.

“The most expensive meal was actually McDonald’s over there.”

They never got north to Chiang Mai. The heat would have been too much for the children and the cost of adding it was too much for the budget, and Andrea is oddly pleased about it, because now there is a reason to go back.

The two younger children, meanwhile, have been to somewhere past twenty countries and never once to Spain, which every child in their class goes to. They feel hard done by. Spain is on the list.

One place that did not work

Asked for the worst place she has been, Andrea does not hedge. Bali. She flags it herself as controversial, and she is careful about why. Having been to Thailand first, she thinks, spoiled it. But the bigger thing was that Bali felt staged to her, every corner set up for a photograph.

“I know this is a pretty picture, but this isn’t the reality.”

That was her writing in her own comments while she was there, and she knows exactly how ironic it is coming from someone posting to Instagram. Plenty of people adore Bali. It was not for her.

Just do it

Next up is Florida in the summer, and a hope of renting a campervan and doing a lap of somewhere in Europe. Beyond that there is a Leaving Cert in the house this year, which is putting manners on the travel plans. Australia by road is the dream. Canada, Mexico, and one day bringing the children back to the Maldives, where she and Damien had their honeymoon.

What she hopes the three of them remember is not the destinations at all. It is that the five of them went, and that they did something a bit different together, and that it was good craic.

And for the parent listening who would love to and has not:

“I think you can really overthink these things, and the idea of them is always a lot worse than the reality.”