"You may not get this opportunity again. Go for it." My father said this to me at twenty-one, freshly graduated, with the "safe" road to grad school right there in front of me. I chose the other road. What he didn't know — what I didn't know — was that he wasn't giving me new advice. He was completing something that had started years earlier, on the other side of the world, at a table inside the Sydney Opera House.
I was a child the first time I sat inside the Sydney Opera House — not for a concert, but for dinner. Bennelong restaurant. Dining under the iconic sails, the Harbour Bridge framing the water beyond the glass. It was a set menu, and I spotted steak tartare. I loved steak. How different could it be? I was warned, lovingly, that my palate might not be ready. I ordered it anyway — I wanted to feel grown-up. Did I love it? Not exactly. But I do now. And every time I order it, I'm back at that table, the harbour glittering outside, falling in love with a city without knowing that's what I was doing.
Eight years later, I booked a one-way ticket to Sydney. It was inevitable — the passport was just the paperwork. I stayed six years. My parents and best friend flew out to visit — we island-hopped through the Whitsundays, I crossed to New Zealand more times than I can count, and Queenstown has earned a permanent place on every client itinerary I've built since. One night, on a whim, I went back to the Opera House — not for dinner, not for a tour, but for a concert of my favorite artist. Standing inside the sails that night — the artist's lights washing the ceiling, the same ceiling I'd looked up at as a child — I was both people at once. The girl who'd wanted to feel grown-up, and the woman who'd crossed an ocean to get there. It felt less like a concert than a confirmation. And I've watched it happen to others, too. The cities change. The dynamic doesn't.
One of my clients' daughters turned thirteen in Paris this year — a francophile long before she had a passport stamp to prove it. For her, this wasn't a vacation. It was an arrival. Her family stayed at the George V, and she sat down to a Michelin-starred set menu at Jules Verne — the Eiffel Tower filling the window, the city of Paris sparkling below — and ordered without hesitation. Then came Versailles — and if there's a moment when a lifelong obsession becomes a lifelong memory, it's probably that one. Standing inside the gates she'd only ever imagined. The palace didn't surprise her. It confirmed everything she already knew. Cakes appeared at every hotel — one of them a gift from her aunt, already in on the celebration from across an ocean — because when a thirteen-year-old finally makes it to the city she's loved from a distance, a single celebration isn't enough.
The common thread isn't fine dining or five-star hotels. It's that somewhere between the set menu and the palace gates, a child files something away that will surface decades later as instinct, preference, or a one-way ticket to a city that never let them go.
They may not thank you at the time. But they will.
Parents — if you have the ability to give your children the world, even a small corner of it, do it. You're not booking a trip. You're building a person.
Caroline | Founder, Vogue Voyage | voguevoyage.co | inquire@voguevoyage.co
"You may not get this opportunity again. Go for it." My father said this to me at twenty-one.