Eric Stoen

Welcome to Travel Babbo! I used to work in healthcare, but was (not so secretly) addicted to travel. I would always post about family trips on Facebook, trying to inspire my friends to take their kids to crazy places too. Then in 2014 I quit my job and started this family travel blog to inspire more people.

I’ve been to 101 countries and seven continents. As a child I saw some of Europe and the South Pacific on family trips, but my travel addiction really began in college when I studied in Florence, Italy for a year and Heidelberg, Germany for a semester. Every weekend was a 3-day weekend, and the goal was to see as much as possible in those three days. This was in the days before cheap, easy intra-Europe flights, so traveling meant taking overnight trains – not the most comfortable mode of travel, but it worked, and I saw much of Europe. Once I graduated from college and grad school I kept it going. Email and international cell coverage made it easy to do my job remotely. Digital photography added a new creative element to the travel. I studied Norwegian for a couple of summers in Oslo. I met up with friends around the world. My goal was to see at least five new countries a year, which I managed for several years.