Hi, we’re Tory and Jeff. In the space of one month, we got married, sold everything we owned, and moved to London. That was over a decade ago. We never really stopped moving — we've ended up in Basel, Switzerland, which still feels like a happy accident.

We've always travelled. Before kids, we were what we called urban hikers: the kind of people who'd book a Friday night Ryanair flight to somewhere new, stay in a tiny Airbnb, and walk 25,000 steps through a city we'd never seen before. We planned obsessively using custom Google Maps, spreadsheets of restaurants timed around opening hours, self-guided food and culture routes through neighborhoods the guidebooks didn't bother with in places like Vienna, Madrid, Mumbai, and Edinburgh. A trip somewhere new felt completely normal.

Having kids didn't change that. It just changed the spreadsheet.

Cheaper flights became preferred flights, picked around sleep schedules. Studios became one-bedrooms. We swapped budget airlines for trains. The daily step count came down to something more reasonable. The planning got more detailed, not less — because when you're traveling with small children, the stakes of a bad afternoon feel very high.

Last year we took a cruise, with one day ashore in Corfu. There were things we really wanted to see, and I knew we needed to move. It was also the first big trip where our daughter was too old for her stroller. We brought a travel scooter and hoped for the best. I knew motivation was going to be an issue.

So we built a hunt.

Clues designed around what she'd actually notice. Breaks in the right places. A clear goal at every stop, and a playground waiting at the end. Children are naturally curious, they love having a mission, love the satisfaction of ticking something off. They also have big feelings and little legs, and the best days are the ones that account for both.

Of everywhere we'd taken her (Croatia, Italy, London, even Tunisia) she remembered and enjoyed Corfu the most. Not the sea. Not the food. The scavenger hunt.

That was the first Small Steps Explorers kit, and we've been building them ever since.

What makes our hunts different

Every Small Steps Explorers kit is built on the same principle: the best stops for children are also the best stops for adults. We don't take you to soft play areas or chain restaurants. We take you to the real city — the local market, the medieval street, the fountain that ices over in winter, the hotel lobby you'd never think to walk into. The clues are written for a four-year-old. The route is designed for a parent who wants to feel like a traveller, not a babysitter.

A note on how we work

Every hunt in our collection is assigned a verification tier, a transparent signal of how thoroughly we've tested it. Our home hunts, like Basel, are walked and tested by our family before they're published. Others are built from deep research and verified by local contacts. We'll always tell you which is which.

We never publish a hunt we wouldn't use ourselves.

We're on Instagram at @smallstepsexplorerstravel! Follow along for new hunt launches, behind-the-scenes from our family walks, and the occasional meltdown we didn't manage to avoid.

If you've used one of our kits, we'd genuinely love to hear how it went.