Meet the Bucket List Family (and their well-travelled kids) (2024)

Jessica and Garrett Gee are an American couple who, for the past eight years or so, have travelled the world with their kids and documented their adventures online. Jessica has a balmy, prom-queen beauty: apple cheeks, long blonde hair and teeth that shine and sparkle like the surf on a Pacific breaker. Garrett has deep, dark eyes, a hippyish taste in footwear and basically no body fat whatsoever, his fitness-model physique, by accident or design, a staple of their output. The cuteness of their children — Dorothy, Manilla and Calihan, who are 11, 9 and 6 — can be measured in kilotons and it is their presence, more than anything else, that has driven the Gees’ popularity. Scroll through their social media feeds and there’s Manilla, during a trip to Bhutan, having his head shaved by a Buddhist monk. There’s Calihan, clinging lovingly to his father’s back as they surf off the Seychelles. There’s Dorothy, in a big white chef’s hat, making pizza in Florence. Every photo seems freewheeling, joyful and perfect. They make your own family holiday snaps look like war reportage.

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These images — and countless more of them all crisscrossing the globe and having incredible experiences — are posted on Instagram, where they are known as “The Bucket List Family” and have close to three million followers; 1.5 million people subscribe to their YouTube channel. Like many deskbound, workaday parents who find travelling with small children stressful and challenging, I have consumed the Bucket List Family’s content with a mix of envy and awe. There is a part of me — an unkind, bitter part — that wants Jessica and Garrett Gee to be in some way monstrous: Insta fame-hungry phonies who are nowhere near as joyful as they make out.

Instead, sitting on the deck of their beachfront home in Hawaii having recently returned from a trip to Madagascar, they are devastatingly pleasant. Jessica describes how having been raised “a traditional all-American girl” from a conservative Colorado family who favoured trips to Disneyland over international travel, she never imagined she would end up seeing so much of the world. “Living outside the box was not remotely on my radar,” she says, chuckling.

The past eight years have also upended the sense of national chauvinism she was raised with. “I think, as naive Americans, we’re often brought up to think that America is the best and that we’re the best at everything. And then you get out there and you see that, oh no, America is not the best country and that every country has its own beautiful aspects.”

But how did they end up perpetually travelling the world as a family in the first place? And how did they manage to make it their job? In August 2015 the pair decided that they would sell as many of their material possessions as they could and use the proceeds to explore the world with, at the time, their two young children. “We sold everything,” Garrett says. “We did a yard sale. We sold our car, a couch, some clothes, some fancy chinaware and dishes.” In total they raised about $45,000 (around £28,000) and used it to leave Utah and travel overseas.

But why? You’d think, when a couple sell their possessions and overhaul their life, it is because they have either reached a point of crisis or intense dissatisfaction. Only, in 2015, things were going great for the Gees. Better than great, in fact. Garrett had spent the previous few years developing a QR-code scanning app and in 2014 sold it to Snapchat for $54 million. Suddenly, this young couple were rich beyond their imaginings. “We felt very blessed and humbled,” Jessica says. “But we didn’t know what the right steps were. Becoming millionaires in our twenties was something neither of us had anticipated.”

It served as a kind of existential alarm clock. After the sale, Garrett took a lucrative role working at Snapchat in San Francisco, but quickly found that working a regular 9 to 5 left him dispirited and restless. “I had this feeling of, like, is there something else out there?” he says. “Is this the right path for us? Should we be doing something different? It was constantly preying on my mind.”

Jessica nods. “If you take away needing to earn an income, you have to think about, ‘What does life mean?’ and, ‘Where do you want to spend your days?’ ” she says, still frowning at the surreality of it.

Eventually, they decided that they would travel with Dorothy, who was three, and Manilla, who was not yet one, on the strict proviso that they didn’t touch any of their newfound fortune. “We told ourselves that we wouldn’t spend any money from the Snapchat acquisition,” Garrett explains. “That would go on savings and investments for the future. But for the travels, we would only use the money from the yard sale.”

After a few months of travelling — Hawaii, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia — the Gees had burnt through most it. But they were also surprised how much they loved their new minimalist, itinerant lifestyle, and realised they had no desire to go back to the States and settle down. “We just wanted to keep going,” Garrett says. He was, however, absolutely adamant that the Snapchat money remain untouched, so if they were going to continue their adventures, they would have to be self-financing. This, I suggest, will strike some people as a bit odd: why not just spend some of the fortune you’d secured to pay for your travels? Isn’t the point of having that much that you don’t have to worry about money? Garrett smiles and replies that this is an aspect of their story that “baffles” a lot of people. For one thing, he says, both he and Jessica were brought up to be “very frugal” and that there is a “joy and happiness” that comes with that way of living. “Being frivolous with your money can very quickly lead to despair.”

But there’s also a practical aspect. Garrett is, both he and Jessica agree, a highly driven man. And when you’re wired that way there’s something frightening about the knowledge that you could coast for the rest of your life. “I’m very entrepreneurial and business-minded,” he says. “It’s a certain fuel that keeps me going and if that flame were to go out, my life would change for the worse. So I’ve purposely not let myself feel rich. I wanted to remain feeling like a hustler who needs to work hard to get by.”

So the Gees hit on a new plan that would allow them to keep travelling while attempting to monetise themselves and their family’s adventures. At this point, in 2015, online “influencer” culture was still relatively nascent. Garrett had been producing a YouTube video blog of their initial Pacific and Asia trip, but this was mostly for friends and family. Now, though, the plan was to professionalise. “I realised that if we wanted to keep travelling, I would have to grow this to the point where we could start working with airlines and destinations and hotels to continue our lifestyle,” he says.

People can achieve brief, viral fame on the internet by accident. But staying famous and maintaining an audience of millions takes deliberate and consistent effort. Part of the reason it’s hard to dislike the Bucket List Family is that they don’t pretend that it isn’t a job and they don’t pretend they aren’t perfectly suited to it. Jessica, for example, explains how she had studied communications and advertising at college. “I wanted to do product placement in movies,” she says brightly. “That was my plan.” Now the Gees earn money by promoting brands — compostable make-up wipes, Land Rover, GoPro cameras — within their content. Already more than social media savvy, Garrett pivoted from app design to photography and videography. For the first year or so, they were breaking even and had to spend a lot of time persuading hotels that free accommodation would be worth the exposure. Since then, the Gees have been a profit-making operation.

Exposing yourself, and your children, to the world has been a learning curve, though. Early on they were the subject of a piece in People magazine. “Which was huge for us,” Jessica says. “The headline was something like ‘Millionaire Family Sells Everything to Travel around the World’. And the comments we got from the readers were the worst! I remember thinking, I don’t care if people judge how I spend my money. But they would criticise the way I look, or they would criticise the way I parent, and I would start to second-guess myself and go into some dark places,” she recalls. Ultimately, it helped her realise she would need a thicker skin when it comes to processing online criticism. “I’ve gone up and down over the past eight years. Sometimes I’m in a very healthy place and sometimes I’m not.”

“It’s really hard, once you get big on social media, to appease everyone,” Garrett says. “You’ll find jealousy and hate. But I think people have also been able to develop a powerful radar for authenticity, and what is and isn’t genuine.”

At the heart of the Bucket List Family project there exists a tension that anybody who has ever used social media will be familiar with, namely the desire to be “authentic” versus the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. “There is a balance,” Jessica says. “You always have to be true and authentic to who you are, but also, you know, try to earn a living.”

To illustrate this point they describe how, to begin with, Garrett would be obsessive about taking the most beautiful pictures he could. And then one day, after desperately racing to catch a plane in Thailand, Jessica posted a selfie in which she looked sweaty and bedraggled: “Like a train wreck,” he says. And that photo almost instantly became their most popular. Garrett feigns outrage. “I was like, guys! I’m showing you the most pristine photos of Thailand. And this is the one you like the most? A garbage selfie? But it was a good lesson for me early on. People care more about the story, the experience, than they do about seeing a postcard.” On the other hand, when Jessica was in agonising pain after being stung on the face by a Portuguese man o’ war and Garrett instantly pulled out his camera, you get the sense she was a little irritated about his priorities.

Jessica has just written a travel book for National Geographic, based on her family’s adventures. Much of it will be of interest to parents who want tips for travelling with children. She recommends, for example, sitting at the rear of a plane if you want your kids to sleep, as the ambient engine noise there is more conducive to nodding off. Parents are allowed to get stressed, provided they take turns. She and Garrett cope with the constant confinement together — long-haul flights, hotel rooms — by making sure that every morning they both get some time alone in order to exercise. They stopped travelling full-time a few years ago and settled in Hawaii, where their children now attend a private school that is understanding about the fact that they will regularly jet off during term time. The Gees often return to Tanzania — a favourite destination — but say they can live without Las Vegas and Dubai, simply because they prefer natural settings, or some of the Caribbean islands.

They say that if they were solely concerned with getting as many social media views and followers as possible, they would operate quite differently. “In terms of social media, TikTok has changed the game,” Garrett states. “It’s become less about telling stories and more finding whatever the trend is and hopping on board.” Often, they say, a brand will ask if they would do a TikTok dance trend as part of a sponsored post. “That kind of stuff performs really well, and it’s very tempting to just sell out and do that,” Garrett say. But ultimately they always decline the offer. “I don’t want to look back and it be us doing silly little dances.”

“We don’t play the YouTube game,” Jessica adds, meaning that, rather than releasing short, snappy videos every day, they post 40 to 50-minute videos once a week. Even this, though, is coming to an end, as they recently announced they will soon stop posting YouTube videos altogether. “Our kids are getting to a certain age,” Garrett notes, meaning, I think, that they are developing a growing awareness that what their family does is not usual. “They’ll come home from school and be like, ‘What’s a subscriber?’ or, ‘Someone says we have one million subscribers,’ ” he continues. At some point, probably quite soon, the couple are going to have to prepare themselves for the fact their children may not want to get on yet another plane. “They’re going to say, ‘I don’t want to go on a trip — I want to stay at home with my friends,’ ” Garrett says, his features tightening at the thought. “And we’re going to have to honour their wishes. But it’s going to be hard. Really hard.”

Until then, they are going to continue being the Bucket List Family. They are about to set off to the Antarctic, and after that they’re not quite sure. “People’s first impressions are normally like, oh wow, they’re some wealthy, extravagant family that’s all about travel. But pretty quickly they realise that travel is almost a façade,” Garrett finishes. “We’re a regular family. We just happen to be having our family experiences in different destinations around the world.”
Bucket List Family Travel: Share the World with Your Kids on 50 Adventures of a Lifetime by Jessica Gee (£30, National Geographic) is published on February 6. To order, call 020 3176 2935 or go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members