About Sails & Trails

Hi, I'm Bailey

By day I'm a cloud architect. In my actual life I'm a reader of library books about botany, microbiology, brewing, biophilic design, and whatever non-fiction happens to catch my eye. I garden. I play video games — I used to work in the industry, actually. I cook. I am the person in the family who researches a restaurant for three weeks before we go, not because I'm anxious about it, but because anticipating a good thing is part of enjoying it.

What I love most about travel is the same thing I love about all of those hobbies: the new. New tastes, new sounds, new places, new ideas. Cruising and hiking both deliver this in abundance, which is probably why our family keeps doing both.

I started this site because we kept having these incredible experiences and I couldn't find anyone writing about them the way I actually needed — with the real logistics, the honest assessments, the stuff that matters when you're coordinating seven adults and three kids under six across multiple cabins. So I decided to write it myself.

The crew

I travel with my husband, our daughter (5), and our son (3). Our kids are already hikers in training — our daughter now walks her own way around Disneyland, which is a huge milestone — and they are enthusiastic, if occasionally opinionated, travel companions.

Most of our big trips are organized by Barbara — my mother-in-law and co-author of this site. She is a planner, an adventurer, and the kind of person who goes on multi-week backpacking trips and dehydrates her own food to do it. My father-in-law is her equal on the trails — he could probably hike indefinitely if given the chance, and is an active planner on that side of things. The cruises he does for love, occasionally while grumbling about it. We are a loud and happy group when we're all together, which I think is exactly what Barbara is going for.

We're also regularly joined by my brother-in-law, his wife (who runs marathons, because everyone in this family is amazing), and their daughter — who did her first Disney cruise at almost one year old and has strong opinions about most things. My other brother-in-law is in college and cruises with his mom when scheduling allows. Before having their daughter, my brother-in-law and his wife knocked out a pre-baby bucket list that included Antarctica and Africa. The bar for "good trip" in this family is set extremely high, is what I'm saying.

What we write about

Cruises — mostly Disney Cruise Line right now, with a long history of Royal Caribbean. We write about the real experience: what concierge actually gets you, how to handle sea days with toddlers, what to do in port when half your group needs a nap. We book a lot of cabins and we pay attention to everything.

Trails — Barbara covers the serious multi-day routes (England's Coast to Coast, New Zealand's Great Walks, Tour du Mont Blanc). We cover the family end: local hikes, first camping trips, the gradual process of building little legs that can go farther every year.

Why the detail

When we're planning a trip, we want to know everything. What the lounge actually looks like at 8am. Whether the cabana is really worth it. What happens if your two-year-old won't go near salt water. I write the posts I couldn't find when I was looking.

If this site becomes a resource that cruise lines and travel companies find useful — if they want to work with a real multi-generational family who writes about their experiences with this level of detail — that would be wonderful. But first and foremost, this is for the people sitting at their computers at midnight researching a trip they're really excited about. I see you. I am you.