Traveling with grandpa or grandma once conjured images of a drive to the beach, with maybe a side trip for a cone at Dairy Queen.

 

Those trips are getting more upscale, though, as the travel industry rides the wave of boomer-generated trips with grandchildren. How about a nine-day jaunt with your progeny to Costa Rica to check out acrobatic monkeys and fabulously colored toucans?

Maybe baseball is more to your liking. How about a tour of the sport's sacred grounds, a weeklong trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., then on to Fenway Park in Boston?

 

If you have a few grand to drop -- and want to spend time with little Johnny or Jane -- then you're Tom Easthope's kind of grandparent.

Easthope is the founder and president of the Seattle-based Generations Touring Co. He organizes 20 to 30 trips a year designed to bring together families that often are spread around the country. He's big on education, family history and what he calls responsible tourism -- "take only memories and leave only footprints," he said.

 

He's not the only tour organizer tapping into the growing boomer market. A 2005 study showed 35 percent of grandparents taking one or more vacations with their grandchildren in the previous year, according to the YPBR/Yankelovich Partner National Leisure Travel Monitor.

 

Easthope started developing his business after Sept. 11, 2001, when much of the tourism business dried up. The trips have a starting price of about $5,000 for one adult and child, according to his Web site.

 

Traveling together gives a grandparent and child a chance to interact -- often a missing element for families living in different parts of the country.  While his tours don't set age limits for kids, the best time for a grandchild appears to be 12 to 13 years old.

"We find they're at the right age where they're beginning to understand there's a bigger world, and are able to take care of themselves," Easthope said.  The generations bring different expectations, he said, forcing him to find the right balance of adult-oriented and kid-friendly activities.

 

"Kids learn by doing," Easthope said.  Adults, by contrast, "want in-depth answers" from tour guides.

 

Generations Touring -- www.generations touring.com -- provides guides that include political, economic and cultural information.

The printed materials include two pages of blank family trees. The tour guides encourage the children to discuss, and write down, their family histories.  "That conversation, in this geographically dispersed world, is not one that usually happens," Easthope said.

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Read Chapter one

 

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