I grew up in a road trip family. Monthly three- to four-hour drives (depending on traffic) from our home on California’s Central Coast to my grandpa’s house in Los Angeles. A cross-country drive to Florida in a minivan with the back seats reconfigured to accommodate a boxy TV and an N64. In my imagination, there was no road we wouldn’t take.

I kept the road trip traditions alive after moving out for college and beyond. California to Auburn University in Alabama multiple times (my English bulldog and a tight budget kept me from flying home for the holidays). Anywhere reachable in a weekend by rental car from New York City. Crisscrossing the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. New York City to Denver in a U-Haul. Cramming four adults and a toddler in a Fiat for seven hours from Istanbul to the coast near Bodrum and back.

My early road trips came full circle on a multigenerational drive from Denver to New Mexico. My mom, Gail, and my sister, Ashley, packed into my car on an autumn day just like we had decades ago, though this time I was in the driver’s seat and had added one more passenger: my daughter, Margot. Traveling with a toddler is always a gamble. She had handled the drives in Türkiye with ease, however, so I was hopeful. Plus, I had TikTok’s favorite parenting travel hack in the back seat: grandma.

Multigenerational family trips have been having a moment since the height of the pandemic passed. One prominent travel industry survey found a “significant rise in multi-generational trips,” while another survey found 49 percent of parents now choose a trip with grandparents and children over a vacation sans kids.

A couple of weeks before our drive, we mapped out a general route: five hours from Denver to Las Vegas, New Mexico, for one night; an hour’s drive to Santa Fe, where we’d pick up my wife, Heather, from the airport and stay two days; and finally, one night in Taos — about an hour and a half away — before making the four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Denver.

Our plan remained flexible, partly because road trips with a toddler always require room for spontaneity, and partly because — despite being a well-traveled family — we’re not great at creating or sticking to itineraries.

New Mexico in October proved to be the perfect choice. My mom had visited parts of the Land of Enchantment when she was younger and had places she wanted to share with us, but the rest of us had yet to really see the state. It’s close enough to home in Denver to avoid overly long driving days, yet far enough away to feel completely removed. Fall in the desert is also especially accommodating for a child who always wants to be outside.

As expected, we deviated from the original plan and took some side trips. And once again it felt like there were no roads we wouldn’t take.