You Only Get 18 Summers: Make This One the One They Never Forget

Someone said something to me years ago that I have never shaken off. “You only get 18 summers with your children before they leave home.” I remember doing the maths and feeling it land in my chest. Our boys were already teenagers when Jacob and I started building Few & Far Luvhondo, so a good number of those summers had already gone. That realization changed how I thought about family travel.

Here is what I know after years of watching families come through our doors and from travelling with my own family: children do not remember hotel rooms. They do not remember the thread count. They remember the morning when they crouched over fresh leopard tracks in the sand with one of our guides. They remember the sound their grandfather made when a giraffe appeared on the ridge ten metres from the game drive vehicle. They remember the night the power of the Milky Way shut everyone up, even the teenagers. Making memories together is what counts and what makes for extraordinary travel experiences that are talked about for years together.

When Grandparents Come Along

We took our first African safari adventure as a family with my parents in tow. Some of the most powerful weeks at Few & Far Luvhondo involve multiple generations. Our small lodge means that one extended family can take over the whole lodge exclusively if they like. The entire place just to yourselves! Grandparents have their own suite and their own space. Teenagers can roam. Little ones have the freedom of the bush with our guides watching everything. Parents get an evening to themselves because we offer babysitting and additional child care support so they can have romantic sundowners on the cliff edge without worrying. Each group gets their own private game drive vehicle and personal guide, so if grandma would like a slower pace in the morning while the teenagers go out with the tracking team at dawn everyone is free to find their own rhythm. Everyone can come back together around the fire in the evening or at the pool as the sun slips behind our mountains.

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A grandmother wrote to me a few months after her family's stay. She said Few & Far Luvhondo had given her something she did not know she was missing. Time with her grandchildren where nobody was distracted, nobody was halfway somewhere else. Just three generations in a wild place, covered in dust, sharing a story that belonged to all of them equally. She said it was the best gift anyone had ever given her. When I read that, I sat with it for a long time. This was why we built this place.

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What Children Actually Do at Few & Far Luvhondo

Our Young Explorers programme was not designed by a marketing team. It grew out of watching what our own children and our guests' children were drawn to when given freedom in the bush. It turns out that children are natural conservationists when you give them the chance. They track animals with our guides. They learn to identify the crested barbet and the trumpeter hornbill by call, not by looking it up on a screen. They go out with our conservation team and learn how camera traps work and why the data matters. A nine-year-old told me recently that she wants to be a wildlife ecologist, like Dawn Booyens our Chief Ecologist, when she grows up. She had not heard of the job before she came to Few & Far Luvhondo.

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The hands-on conservation work is what sticks with families the most. Older children and teenagers can join our field team removing invasive plant species, repairing waterholes, or walking the snare lines with the anti-poaching unit. Not a staged activity, but the real daily work of rewilding of what will be 100,000 hectares of degraded land back to health. I have watched teenagers who arrived glued to their phones spend an entire morning pulling invasive wattle with our conservation team, covered in red Limpopo soil, completely absorbed. Their parents stand at the edge of the clearing with a look on their face that I have come to recognise. It is the look of someone “seeing” their child properly for the first time in months.

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Then being able to top off a morning of  “productive work” with a wild swim in a waterfall that required criss-crossing through streams to get there is priceless. Or encountering a leopard just after it killed an impala is a profound memory that stays with you forever. Walking with giraffes, encountering extraordinary wildlife, hiking mountains, climbing through gorges, sleeping out under the stars is filling each and every day with memories that will last a lifetime.

No Itinerary. Your Rhythm.

There is no fixed schedule at Few & Far Luvhondo. Morning people head out on a bush walk along the Warthog Trail at dawn. Late risers have breakfast brought to them through the butler hatch without anyone knocking on the door. The energetic ones take the mountain bikes through indigenous forest or hike the cliff paths. The readers sit by the plunge pool and watch nyala and zebra on the slopes below. The children drift between all of it, following whatever catches their attention, which is how it should be.

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The stargazing sleepout on the mountain platform is the one thing I tell every family to do. You sleep out in the open, on the ridge, with the Soutpansberg sky above you. The southern hemisphere stars from up here are extraordinary. I have never met a child, or an adult for that matter, who has been unimpressed.

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The Table Where Everyone Shows Up

And as for dining experiences, families eat together in the boma under open skies, or out on a bush picnic blanket somewhere on the reserve that the guides have chosen for the view. Children eat what everyone else eats, or we accommodate them with whatever they need. We have managed everything from dairy-free toddlers to teenagers who only eat pasta. Our kitchen does not blink.

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What I notice most at dinner is the conversation… By the second or third evening, families are talking differently. The children are telling stories about things they found on the walk. The grandparents are asking questions about the rewilding work. Our bush boma and an open fire does that. There is nothing like eating outdoors, fire crackling, the bush sounds building as the night gets darker, to pull a family into the same moment. It is very hard to be distracted when a spotted eagle owl is calling from the baobab above your head.

The Clock Is Running

Eighteen summers. Maybe ten of yours have already gone. Maybe fifteen. The number matters less than what you do with the ones you have left. I genuinely believe that one week where your family slows down, gets their hands in the soil, eats together under the stars, and pays attention to each other without a screen in the way is worth more than a dozen resort holidays where everyone drifts to their own corner by the pool.

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We built Few & Far Luvhondo, with our two teenage sons and yours in mind. We wanted to build the kind of place where a child puts their phone in their bag without being asked. Where a father sees a version of his daughter he did not know existed. Where a grandmother holds her grandson's hand on a cliff path and neither of them lets go.

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This summer, give your children a story that starts with the 4x4 climbing a shale road up into the Soutpansberg mountains and ends with all of you lying under stars so bright they forget to ask for the Wi-Fi password. Give them Few & Far Luvhondo. You will not get this summer back so make it count!

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Few and Far Few & Far Luvhondo sits in the Soutpansberg Mountains of Limpopo, South Africa. Six cliff suites. Private game vehicles and personal guides. A Young Explorers programme. Farm-to-table dining under the stars in the bush. To start planning your family's summer, contact us at info@fewandfarcollection.com. We can’t wait to hear from you.

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