By Maria Dolan

I’m soaking in the hot pool of a hammam in Cordoba, southern Spain, with my travel companion, Kathleen. The red-tiled walls of this cavernous Turkish bath are beaded with droplets, and the air is thick with steam. Across the water Kathleen is tucked into another corner of the pool, her long, gray-blond hair springing free of the thick braid into which she’s tamed it. We giggle at men wearing micro-bikinis, splash each other with water, and reminisce about the incredible lunch we’ve just eaten at a Middle Eastern restaurant: a feast of fresh-squeezed orange juice, fluffy falafel, and six kinds of cookies, compliments of the chef. We’re entirely relaxed.

Then I ease myself out of the water onto the wet tiled floors, headed for another tub, and though I’m not wobbling, Kathleen shoots out a hand to steady me. “Watch out!” she says, her voice suddenly tense. “Don’t slip.”

She’s not just my companion, after all. She’s my mother.

Mother/daughter travel beyond childhood can be a lot like travel of two unrelated friends. Mom and I have taken several trips together since I graduated from college 15 years ago. We’ve done a Napa Valley weekend, complete with sulfurous mud baths, and a two-week hiking trip in Switzerland, where we scaled edelweiss-dotted mountains and gorged on noodles kugel. She was 49 to my 23 that time, but she was willing to bunk down in youth hostels—my budget—anyway. Five years ago, not too long before I became pregnant with my daughter, we took that trip to Spain and rambled through Andalusia, gawking at the colorful Moorish-inspired gardens of Seville, Cordoba, and Grenada. We laughed hysterically at the same absurdities, gasped together at spectacular sights, and sipped sherry at café tables while scribbling in our journals and drawing awkward pictures with the box of colored pencils she brings on trips.

Yet like all things familial, this particular adventure path has its own language, rewards, and pitfalls. Sometimes that’s great—for instance, my mom’s concern for me (and mine for her) can be reassuring and nurturing. Sometimes it’s a challenge: like when Mom loses her glasses (again) and instead of viewing it as just an accident, as I might with a friend, I file it in the category of “lifelong problem with forgetfulness”; or when I don a flirty skirt for an evening at a flamenco show, and she deems it overly sexy. We can have a great time together, but we also know how to aggravate each other beyond anything I’ve experienced with my friends.

The benefits of mother/daughter travel must outweigh the trials, however, because we’re far from alone on the road. According to recent studies, such as a 2006 American Express travel agent poll, mother/daughter travel is on the rise. And while these agents reported mothers and daughters most often bond with a spa getaway (I’m not sure our day at the pedicure-free hammam would count), my less formal research on such intergenerational duos concludes that there are plenty of mothers and daughters connecting in the mountains, on foreign city streets, and through other adventurous travel. If you’re interested in joining the fray, here are four examples of how it can work.

Emilie Coulter and her mother, Page, had always gotten along, so Emilie wasn’t surprised that their first trip together, a two-week hiking trip in Kauai several years ago when Emilie was 30 and her mother was 60, turned out splendidly. “We’re very compatible,” says Emilie. Both women are adventurous, athletic, and, as Page says, “like to take all the side roads.”

Yet it took travel to show them just how similar they are. Since Emilie’s college years, they’d lived across the country from each other—daughter in Seattle and mother (and father) in New Hampshire. Emilie was used to seeing her mom only on family vacations home, where it was easy for her and her siblings to fall into their childhood roles.

“We hadn’t had a clear adult relationship,” says Emilie of her mother. Their Hawaii trip—which took place after Emilie extended an invitation Page to come on a trip she’d been planning solo—gave them a fresh footing. “The trip was a turning point,” she says.

The two women have since taken a multiday Grand Canyon hike with several of Emilie’s friends, a guided tour to Machu Picchu (a treat from Page for the two of them), and an eight-day backpacking trip on the Wonderland Trail around Washington’s Mount Rainier with another friend.

Through adventure travel, Page discovered a newfound respect for her daughter, who encouraged her mom in her struggles with a heavy backpack and never sprinted ahead even when Page set a slower pace. Emilie, for her part, learned things about her mother’s life and inner feelings that she’d never known. It shifted their previous relationship, which she saw as having been “on a more superficial plane.”

“I think we both had some of that New England reserve,” she says. “Sitting side-by-side on a mountain, it’s easier to reveal personal, intimate details.”

“Emilie and I go through periods where we e-mail every day,” agrees Page. “We have no trouble spilling out our innermost thoughts, and I think that has come from these trips together.”

Nora Isaacs, San Francisco author of Women in Overdrive: Find Balance and Overcome Burnout at Any Age (Seal Press, 2006), admits that she and her mother, Faith, “know how to push each other’s buttons.” Nevertheless, she says that two trips she’s taken in the past few years with her mother—to Europe for a wedding and to Las Vegas at the end of one of Nora’s business trips—have allowed them to “just have fun together” away from their busy lives.

“My father can’t boil an egg, and they’ve been married 40 years,” Nora says as a way of explaining the extent of her mother’s role as family caretaker. As a writer, a yoga instructor, and the mother of a young son, Nora herself tends to have an overscheduled life. “In daily life, or when my mother and I see each other, it’s all about getting something done or having a meal.”

Researching her book reminded Nora how necessary it is to slow down sometimes for the sake of an important relationship. “One of the things about getting out of overdrive is that you have to step back and look at your priorities and see what’s really important to you,” she says.

With that in mind, Nora has learned to work with the occasional strife on their trips rather than get stuck in it. One of the pair’s conflicts arose over Nora’s need for quiet in the morning, whereas Faith springs from bed ebullient and ready to chat. “I hadn’t spent that much time with her since my childhood,” says Nora, “and it took me a few cranky mornings before I realized I had to just tell her that I needed a period of time without talking each day.”

As a yoga teacher and a writer on health and wellness issues, Nora tries to follow the lessons she’s learned from her work. “When issues come up, remember what’s important about spending time with your mom instead of being reactive in the moment,” she says. And it doesn’t hurt to plan stress-free activities. Most recently, Nora invited Faith to Las Vegas for the weekend after wrapping up a freelance job in the city; she hired a hotel babysitter for her son so that she and her mother could head to the spa. “I paid for her to get a treatment,” says Nora, “and she got some wrap she would never get. I was so happy to see her having fun and taking a break.”

When Seattleite Kate Cunningham, creator of adventuretripfinder.com, proposed a cross-country bike trip to her bookish, artistic daughter, 13-year-old Mackenzie Brown was intimidated. Yet riding on a tandem with her mother up to 90 miles a day for two months still beat the alternative: two more months of middle school.

“It was such a relief for me to get out of that,” says Mackenzie, now a 19-year-old college student. “Middle school was awful.” For her part Kate had cycled twice across the country with groups before having a child, but she still had some trepidation about keeping her daughter safe from San Diego all the way to Florida. It was made more difficult by pressure from skeptical family members, including Kate’s father, who “greatly protested the idea of two women traveling alone.”

Nevertheless, the two trained for months and hit the road in April that year, long before school got out. One choice Kate made with safety in mind was to get them both on a tandem so she’d never lose sight of her daughter. The unanticipated result was that they got in sync both physically and mentally. The captain (the person riding in front) has to trust the stoker (the person in back) to anticipate when the captain will shift in the seat, turn, or slow down. If the stoker stops paying attention, the bike could topple. Likewise, the captain must be trusted to make good navigation decisions.

“It was an interesting relationship because you have to trust in the person in back of you completely—in this case, my daughter,” says Kate. With 12 feet of vehicle, including the bicycle and bike trailer, everything had to be coordinated.

The two faced some intense moments in scary traffic and a lot of exhaustion on biking days that occasionally stretched into the evening. They usually got into their planned campsite (and, later in the trip, their motel) without problems, but once they were turned away at their designated campground and ended up pitching their tent on the lawn of an elementary school, hitting the road when the first teachers arrived in the morning. Nevertheless, they were spared truly dangerous encounters, and the bike stayed securely upright for all 3,000 miles of road.

Their travel journals (one of the few luxuries in a streamlined packing scheme that eliminated hair ties and nail clippers) are packed with incredible memories, from the entrées they’d order at restaurants after long days on the road to the characters they’d meet when they pulled into each town.

“We talk so much about quality time, but it was the quantity of time,” says Kate. “She had so much of my attention. She would tell me the plotlines of some of her favorite movies. I wouldn’t have had the patience for that in regular life.”

“We’d had normal teenager/parent strife,” says Mackenzie. “Learning to work together on something like that is powerful. I think we became a lot closer because we had to rely on each other. You’re a team.”

Sometimes it turns out that you’re on different teams, usually with a long-standing rivalry. Colorado nurse Marian Burke said that she and her mother took a trip to Italy during which the only thing they agreed on was that the end couldn’t come soon enough.

“It wasn’t so much what we did but how we wanted to do it that was the problem,” says Marian. In Florence, for example, a trip to the Uffizi art museum ended badly when Marian wanted to linger at her favorite art while her mother declared the paintings “subpar” and retreated to a bench for the rest of their visit. They were invariably out of sync in their daytime plans, each one ready to eat or nap at a different hour. Marian realized that she and her mother should never have planned a trip to start with.

“I had thought that spending more time with my mother would help bring us together,” she says, “but it turns out that there’s a reason for the distance between us—we’re just two very different people.” She finds it hard to drop the idea of mother/daughter trips but has concluded that she should put her energy into traveling with compatible friends instead. “Just because you’re related doesn’t mean you should lock yourselves in a hotel room together,” she says. Yet another lesson learned on the mother/daughter travel road.

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Mother/Daughter Travel

If you're worried about conflict, here are some tips to consider before you go:

• Make sure both parties are involved in the planning. Otherwise, it's easy for a mother/daughter power dynamic to happen.
• Talk about your daily rituals and requirements in advance. Morning coffee before conversation? Afternoon nap? Two hours alone with your journal before bed? Talk about it before you get there.
• Get money issues sorted out before you leave. Some recommend creating a fund for the trip and pooling money in the beginning for travel expenses.
• Younger daughters may put a premium on staying in touch with their friends back home, so mothers might consider getting them a calling card-and also a journal.

Good Bets for Mother/Daughter

Adventure Las Olas Surf Safaris for Women
www.surflasolas.com

What: Surf camp that hosts many mother/daughter pairs

Where: Central Pacific coast of Mexico

When: Between November and June each year

Details: Learn to surf in luxury with your mother or daughter—or watch your travel partner surf while you hike, read, and relax. These popular trips book far in advance, so reserve early. Cost: $2,695 per person per week

www.womenswilderness.org

What: Mother/daughter backpacking

Where: Snowy Range, Wyoming

When: July 21–23, 2007 (other trips available)

Details: Learn backcountry navigation and other outdoor skills. Welcomes mothers and daughters age 10 to adult. Cost: $375

www.giveuswings.org

What: Mother/daughter volunteer trip

Where: Kenya and Uganda

When: Three weeks in July 2007 (to be repeated in 2008)

Details: Volunteer with an on-the-ground nonprofit run by a Minneapolis mother/daughter duo. Price includes food, in-country transportation and lodging, translation, and a safari. Cost: $2,500 per person, not including airfare

www.adventurecycling.org

What: Farm Fresh bike ride

Where: Northern California

When: September 16–29, 2007 (other trips available)

Details: Fully supported intermediate-level bike ride “blending your passions for cycling and gastronomy.” Mothers, daughters, and others may sign on. Cost: $1,799 per person for two-week trip

Books for Inspiration

1. Two in the Wild: Tales of Adventure from Friends, Mothers, and Daughters by Susan Fox Rogers (Vintage, 1999; $13)
2. Making Connections: Mother-Daughter Travel Adventures edited by Wendy Knight (Seal Press, 2003; $17)