How to have a great holiday with adult children

If there’s one thing everyone in our family of four likes to do, thankfully, it’s travel. I remember vividly the delight and sense of freedom I felt when both our children were old enough, curious enough and flexible enough to be packed into the minivan for a road trip. As my daughters grew into teenagers, unsurprisingly, the joy of venturing off together was tested and tempered. But, to my great relief, they emerged from the thorny thicket of adolescence again willing to go places with their father and me. Sharing a mutual appreciation of a glorious sunrise, a spectacular landscape or an unexpectedly charming air-field restaurant with my college-age kids was sweetly gratifying. And watching them enthusiastically set off on their own adventures made me stupidly happy, even though I occasionally worried.

Now we’re entering a new stage. And though it gets less attention than travelling with young children, there are as many joys and as many complications in travelling with your adult offspring.

I learned this when the four of us - my daughters were then 21 and 23 - took an 18-day trip to China together last summer, spending much of it touring the county’s beautiful, remote Yunnan Province, where our younger daughter had been studying. Over the trip, we had to catch seven flights, spend a night together in a tiny sleeper train compartment, find restaurants to please every palate, and survive two illnesses, a mountainside van breakdown, altitude sickness, a shakedown and a couple of questionable hotels. Amazingly, we returned still speaking to one another.

But, much more important, we bonded over experiences - including the terrifying, the humorous and the sublime - that have been knit into the tapestry of our family’s collective memory. And my husband and I got to see China through the eyes of 20-somethings.

Here are some guidelines for parents travelling with grown-up children:

—Washington Post