Hi, I am a single mom with one 16 year old daughter. I am looking for travel ideas for this summer. Anyone have tips or suggestions on vacations that would be fun for both of us?

Ask your daughter where she would like to go! When DS graduated high school, I expected him to ask for a car. Instead he asked for a trip with me to Guatemala and Belize. He had spent the summer before on a youth project in Belize and wanted to show me what he did. We spent a full month traveling from Mexico City to Guatemala to Belize to Yucatan. When DD graduated the following year, she asked for a trip to Hawaii so we spent one week on Waikiki and one week on Maui.

catspjs makes a good point so long as you both can enjoy the trip. New York City has many venues of interest. Are you thinking about U.S. or other?

What are your common interests???

I did ask what my daughter wants to do. Ideally, she wants to be with friends. I am not in a position to invite her friends to go with us on vacation. Also, being recently widowed, I’m not so happy with the idea of being left alone while she goes off to a teen hangout if we went on a cruise. I would like to find ideas for us to do together. Has anyone else been in this situation?

Are there previous family trips where you did activities that you both enjoyed, and can you build on that? For example, if you've been to San Francisco and she enjoyed the variety and diversity there, then maybe New York would be good. Or if she liked a hiking trip in the Smokey Mountains, think about hiking in the Rocky Mountains.

Another idea is to develop a theme, and base your trip on that. We took a trip to NYC when our oldest kid was a teen, she was a big film buff at the time (and now in her 20s, hoping to make film production her career). I looked up all sorts of movie film locations, and we visited those. And for our youngest kid, a feminist and a foodie, I've sought out restaurants owned and/or chef'd by women.

Hawaii? New Orleans? London? Paris?

But seriously it's impossible to make appropriate suggestions since we have no idea either of your interests, or better yet if there are interests you share, and you don't mention budget or if this is domestic or foreign travel.

If your daughter isn't into this idea and would rather stay home with friends, I'm not sure any ideas we can come up with are going to be a success.

Where would YOU want to go, in an ideal world, if your daughter would go along with it??

Many, many women are in similar situations. Do you have any friends or family, cousins, your sister, parents, etc., who might also like to go? Could her friends and one of their Mom’s perhaps go and pay for themselves? We have a similar situation. GD likes doing things with her Mom, but not the whole time. Given a choice, she prefers any vacation that includes a friend. Kids like having others close in age for at least part of the time. The nice thing about a cruise is you could do excursions like seeing Stingrays, shows, dinner together, and she could still have some company her own age. If you asked to sit at a large table, you would easily meet other people, so not be alone yourself. For all these reasons, a cruise is my DD’s favorite vacation with our GD. You might also consider just some three days breaks for a beach or theater, etc. another thought. Do you have any family that would like you to visit for three or four days, and who would not mind your daughter bringing a friend? Might be iffy. Depends on the hostess. Only you would know.

Are you a member of a religious group? I know some churches, like Unitarian Universalists have multi-generation summer camps. There are also things like learning to sail, so maybe something specific you could learn or do together. Bike tour, rafting trip, tour to someplace with lots of sight seeing, a volunteer vacation where you do something like habitat or some kind of work with animals.