Whether you're the mom or you're traveling with Mom, memories from those trips can last a lifetime. Here the Traveler staff shares some of their favorites.

Chilling in the Catskills
By Marilyn Terrell, Chief Researcher

The summer rental house near the town of Margaretville in New York's Catskill Mountains was bright, airy, and well equipped, with plenty of room for our five kids, one of their friends, and our two dogs.

Outside sat 20 acres of hemlock forest to explore, a stream, and a swimming pond with a dock, a rope swing, and lots of frogs. Plus an outdoor ping-pong table, a rope hammock between two trees, and a fire pit with plenty of firewood. If our kids couldn't make fun out of this, my husband and I would hand in our parenting licenses.

One day, my daughter Lucy and I hiked with our dog Sully to Giant Ledge on Slide Mountain. We saw a magnificent view at the top and a coyote crossing the road at the bottom. Another day we drove to Woodstock to see my brother-in-law's paintings in a gallery, where the kids smirked at the graying hippies dancing in the tourist-jammed streets. And, despite the warning in a famous New Yorker cartoon to "get those Adirondack chairs out of the Poconos!" we enjoyed the non-native chairs on our Catskills lawn.

The water in our pond was spring-fed and chilly, but the kids kept the fire pit stoked so they could shiver by the flames when they got out of the pond.

Sitting around the fire pit at night, listening to the waterfall, watching shooting stars, sucking out the insides of charred marshmallows, life seemed just about perfect.

Moose-Hunting Memories
By Carol Enquist, Photo Editor

When my son, Jack, was two and my daughter, Kirsten, was five, I took them on their first trip to Finland. (We traveled to the Swedish-speaking region, where both of my parents were born and raised and where most of my extended family lived.) Each had their favorite experiences; Jack loved to ride with my cousin on his tractor, while Kirsten liked the swing my father put up in a birch tree. We all enjoyed picking strawberries and heading out for long boat rides to nearby islands, but, more than anything else, our favorite family activity was to pile into my dad's avocado-green Datsun and go "moose-hunting."

My father, mother, sister, brother-in-law, and the three of us would head out around 10 or 11 p.m. in the waning light and drive the back roads into the woods to look for moose who were foraging for food. As uncomfortable as it was being crammed into the small car, we couldn't wait to see how many moose we could spot. In the excitement, sometimes a moose turned out to be a tree or boulder on closer inspection, but when we finally found one, the car grew hushed, and we'd open the windows in spite of the voracious mosquitoes to take turns watching our quarry. It was always a thrill.

On our last trip, 19 years later, we were at it again . . . only this time Jack was behind the wheel of the same avocado-green Datsun.