I Just Got Home From a Trip With 12 People. It Would Have Been Unbearable Were It Not for a Simple, Underrated Solution.

Life There’s Only One Palatable Way to Travel With Friends It involves not seeing them. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Luke Winkie? Aug 23, 20265:40 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by frankpeters/Getty Images Plus and Jovanmandic/iStock/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. At the end of July, several friends and I took a vacation to Paris, to both celebrate someone’s 35th birthday and spend money lavishly and irresponsibly before everyone starts having kids. Our headcount was a dozen people—including three couples—some of whom would be meeting for the very first time on this trip. I’m guessing this sounds hellish to you, and trust me, I had my hang-ups. I had visions of baroquely complicated dinner reservations and horribly testy Venmo negotiations. I feared a vacation itinerary so hopelessly brittle—with so many moving parts—that if one person were late to an appointment, everything would fall to pieces. Because seriously, how do you split up that many Airbnb rooms without hurting feelings? How on earth could we fit 12 people into a wine tasting? But to my surprise, we figured out all of these potential problems with considerable elegance, so much so that I want to clue you in. It’s simple. Just make your vacation a parallel play vacation. Let me show you what I mean. “Parallel play,” as you probably already know, is a term used for a childhood development stage where toddlers engage in activities in close proximity with one another without actually playing together. One kid is on the Hot Wheels, the other kid is on the blocks, and neither of them yet possess the intellectual hardware to collaborate on those ventures. If you translate the parallel play concept to a week in Europe with a bunch of thirtysomethings, the term instead means a vacation where—outside a few lodestones on the schedule—nobody, and I do mean nobody, plans anything with each other. No 10 a.m. call times for the Louvre, no mandated aperitif breaks, no death-marches to various crosstown vintage stores, and therefore, none of the suffocating drudgery that sucks the joy out of travel. Anyone on the trip can obviously do those things, but they are to be organized ad hoc with absolutely zero expectation that anyone else will join them. You might be going to the Musée d’Orsay with only two members of the traveling party, and frankly, that is for the best. Because guess what? Those two people actually want to go to the Musée d’Orsay. They will be accompanying you with zeal and buy-in, rather than the pervading anxious feeling that everyone else has been dragged there against their will. We all have our horror stories about the alternative. My editor told me about a rendezvous in Denmark that resulted in several hours searching for a mermaid statue that one friend desperately wanted to see. (Her friend also dragged her to a day-glo EDM rave, and a Berlin sex dungeon, neither of which she wanted to attend. “Maybe I’m a pushover,” she said.) Personally, I mourn the $30 I spent to see an outrageously depressing sloth exhibit in Costa Rica, and I’d take every single night I’ve ever slept in a tent back if I could. That is the beauty of the parallel play excursion: Everyone gets to do what they want, and no one has to do what they don’t. If you ask me, parallel play has always been the shining ideal of travel, particularly travel with friends. Unlike the archetypical kid-heavy family vacation, the adults in your life are autonomous creatures with clear wants and needs, and they can operate independently of the group. This is not the same for young children, who you see skulking around the halls of the Uffizi, or the fields of Gettysburg, or the picturesque shrines of Kyoto, accompanied by their harried and dead-eyed parents, who are absorbing a scant few moments of splendor before their kids start whining about lunch. Unfortunately, we often apply the same principles of those ancient, cursed family vacations to the trips we take later in life with friends. I think about my dearly departed grandparents, who globetrotted with admirable gusto, but only in the context of inflexible bus tours, which is an organizational architecture that would make me go insane. (“At 9:15 a.m. we’re embarking on a three-hour tour of the Terracotta Army, and we’ll be leaving for Shanghai at 1:30 sharp.” Kill me!) By contrast, it is actually perfectly OK, and perhaps even preferable, to see your friends a couple of times on a group trip. That’s it! That’s all you really need. We ended up doing two group dinners on our Paris trip where all 12 members of the group were present, and those nights were absolutely lovely. We gulped down wine and serenaded the birthday girl, much to the bemusement of the locals. But for the rest of the week? Well, I took a solo excursion up to Normandy while the others bopped around the rest of France. (It was a fantastic detour, except when I accidentally gassed up my rental car with diesel.) My wife and I flitted through bars and restaurants with a rotating cast of characters, we peeled off on a Saturday afternoon for a nerdy Rick Steves walking tour, and, in general, we avoided the intense concentration of close human contact that can make travel oppressive and incarcerating. The thing about the parallel play format is you never get sick of your friends, and vice versa. Imagine if I forced all 12 of those people to listen to me read Rick Steves aloud! They’d, justifiably, drown me in the Seine. A parallel play vacation lets you attend to all of your special interests without pissing everyone else off. That cannot be overrated. I’m excited to push this concept even further. As I write this, my wife and I are in the early stages of planning a trip to Japan, which is significantly more complicated than hopping over to Europe. Hotel space is limited, the language barrier is more stringent, and there are innumerable different shapes a vacation to the country can take. (You can hit the Onsen towns, take the train up to Hokkaido, or even spend a week only in Tokyo.) So, naturally, we’re just letting our friends know that for two weeks in the middle of April, we are going to be in Japan. If anyone wants to join, they can book their plane tickets and accommodations—all on their own. I’m sure we’ll see them out there for a night or two. Kids Travel Friendship