Our Story
We didn’t set out to become a travel family.
We set out to give our kids a life that felt big. Somewhere along the way we realized those two things were the same.
We’re Jeff and Matt – two dads living on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, raising two kids who have already learned that the world doesn’t end at the shoreline. We’re a fully vegan household that can’t look at a map without immediately wondering what it would feel like to actually be there.
This is our blog. It’s honest writing from a family that believes travel changes people in ways that are hard to explain and impossible to regret.
How This Started
Like most things that matter, it started small.
A trip here. A week there. The realization that our kids – young as they are – absorbed something on the road that no classroom, no backyard, and no amount of careful parenting at home could quite replicate. They became curious in a different way. More comfortable with differences. More willing to try things that scared them a little.
We noticed it first in small moments. The way our oldest son came out of his shell and could walk up to anyone at a playground and make friends. The way our youngest walked up to an animal he’d never seen before with zero hesitation and complete wonder. The way both of them stopped asking “are we there yet” and started asking “what’s next.”
We were hooked.
Who We Are
We’re a two-dad family and we travel openly. We’ve never hidden who we are on the road and we never will. Part of why we write about LGBTQ family travel is because there isn’t much writing out there from families like ours. We hope to be a resource we wish had existed for families like ours.
We’re fully vegan. Our kids have grown up plant-based and they’re thriving. Traveling as a vegan family presents real challenges and real surprises in equal measure, and we write about both honestly.
Living in Hawaii, we already understand something about island life – the beauty of being surrounded by water, the occasional ache for distance, and the particular freedom that comes from knowing you chose to be somewhere extraordinary. Hawaii is home and we love it deeply. It also made us want to see what other extraordinary looks like.
We also have an adorable senior dog, and any travel we do happens around him, not instead of him. He is family and he is a factor in every decision we make. The honest truth is that the people and animals you love will always matter more than the trips you’re dreaming about.
What We’ve Done So Far
Long before this blog existed, we were already figuring out how to travel as a family – booking long-haul flights with toddlers, learning what to pack and what to leave behind, and discovering which of our plans would survive contact with actual children.
We’ve covered a lot of ground together – domestic and international, short trips and long ones – and every leg of it taught us something about what kind of travelers we are.
Last summer we took our first big international trip in a while – three weeks in Australia. Watching our kids in a completely foreign place was one of the most beautiful things we’ve experienced as parents. Their curiosity, their hunger to learn, their excitement – it grew in ways we could see happening in real time. That trip is where the idea of Two Dads, No Map began.
We have a lot ahead in 2026 – an Alaska cruise, visits with family and friends, and a trip to French Polynesia. Every trip teaches us something. About the world, about our kids, about each other, and about what kind of family we want to be.
What We Believe About Travel
We believe the world is the best classroom, and that children who see it young carry something for the rest of their lives that can’t be taught any other way.
We believe slow travel – staying long enough to find the neighborhood bakery, to recognize faces, to feel briefly like you belong somewhere – is fundamentally different from tourism and infinitely more valuable.
We believe LGBTQ families deserve honest travel resources written by people who actually know what it’s like to navigate the world as two dads with kids.
We believe eating plants and traveling well are completely compatible, and we’re happy to prove it one restaurant at a time.
We believe the best family trips are the ones where everyone – including the parents – comes home changed in some way they can’t quite articulate.
Why No Social Media
We thought about this carefully.
The blog lives here. We share updates by email and on Pinterest – and that’s intentional. We didn’t want to build something tethered to an algorithm, or travel the world with our kids while simultaneously performing that travel for an audience in real time. We wanted to be present. And we wanted to write about it afterward with perspective and honesty, rather than caption it in the moment for engagement metrics.
So there’s no Instagram account for the blog. No TikTok. No follower count we’re chasing.
What we have is this blog, an email list, and a commitment to writing things worth reading. If that sounds like your kind of travel content – we’d love to have you here.
The World Will Wait
We have trips planned. We have a list that keeps growing. We have two kids who now greet every new destination with the kind of open-handed curiosity that makes all the planning worthwhile.
The world will wait. It always does. When the time is right – for our family, in our own way, on our own timeline – we’ll go. And we’ll write every bit of it down.
Until then, welcome to Two Dads, No Map. We’re glad you found us.
