Travel with Young Kids - How?
We’ve learned a lot on our current expedition. In honor of the five years of our oldest kids, here are five “commandments” to chisel onto the itinerary of your vacation (with some fake King James English just for fun).
1. Know Thy Family
For some parents, a 12-hour flight to Japan is a serene voyage with their little angels. The rest of us are picturing an emergency landing in the Pacific to quell the inflight cage match amongst our progeny.
Trips should stretch us as a family - but they shouldn't break us. When it comes to distance and intensity, you know where that breaking point is.
No kids in this Japan picture
The same goes for when you take your trip and for how long. With school and work, use whatever unique levers you have to make as much space as you can. Have young kids? Great - pulling them for a few weeks of kindergarten shouldn’t ruin their chance at Harvard. For work, can you do it remotely? Can you aggressively hoard PTO or take unpaid time off?
What languages do you know? What friendly uncles with far off cabins do you have? Do you like urban or rural? What kind of house setup do you need?
Once you take stock of your family’s unique limitations and advantages, preferences and desires, you should have a trip that’s all your own. Maybe that’s six months in Tokyo - or maybe it’s an AirBnB two towns over. Whatever the case may be, make sure to design your trip with your family in mind.
2. Thou Shalt Travel Slowly
If you desire to travel with young kids, you need to learn to travel slowly.
Your trips are no longer jetting around as fast as you can to see the maximum number of possible things. Slow Travel means living your life in a new place and soaking that place in deeply as a family. In addition to being more rewarding (and often times significantly cheaper with weekly/monthly rates), slow travel is much easier on little people.
Slow travel can be illustrated in the difference between the two trips to Europe that I’ve taken.
Fast Trip 1 (Pre-Kids)
11 different stays across 6 countries. Many flights, much driving.
Sllloooowww Trip 2 (Mucho Kiddo)
2 Stays in 1 Country. Spread over twice as long as trip 1.
The need for bedtimes, play, and massive amounts crap don't disappear when your kids cross an ocean. Instead, these things become more important in a new place. And just think about it for a second - do you really want to be figuring out the pack-and-play, monitor, blackout shades, and nap plans in a different spot every single day?
The biggest gift you can give your kids (and yourselves) is to stay in the same place for at least a week.
For fast-traveling sightseers this is tough (for me too - right now I’m an hour away from Italy- Italy!). But for those who are disciplined enough to limit themselves, a richer experience awaits. For our France trip, that meant that we got to know the ins-and-outs of our city - from the best boulangerie in town to the guys at the local bike shop. By the end, our kids were leading us to all our favorite spots and calling it “Our French Home”. We even made some French friends and hung out with their family on the weekends! (That’s not going to happen when you’re flying around with other tourists to all the “must-see” monuments.)
To be specific, slow travel is:
Day Trips - Check out all the cool spots around your home base
Playgrounds - Prioritize kid happiness and fit the rest (cafes, pubs, museums, etc.) after
Recovery - You can have a crazy day! But then you better take it easy the next day.
3. Pay Not for Thy Flights
You thought that trip was expensive before kids? Try multiplying everything by 5. If flights are involved, I highly recommend you travel for free.
4. Thou Shalt Prep Like a Champion (Today)
If you're currently sitting on the plane wondering if you should have brought snacks and activities for your two-year-old, then let me just say… I'm glad I'm not you.
As soon as we booked the tickets (10 months in advance), my wife immediately got real intense about travel planning.
You ain’t the free-spirit solo-travelers you once were - and you need to up your planning game. So book your Airbnb and start packing.
Personal Soapbox: Hit Pause on Idealism
In "normal times" we try to be as screen-conscious, health-conscious, and every-other-kind-of-conscious as the next family. If there’s a place to bend some of those ideals (so that you can live up to others), it is on a plane, a train, or an automobile.
So for eight hours on the flight, my wife and I gave up our ideals for a “light parental Machiavellianism” - we did anything to get us to that next airport. We brought kiddie tablets. We brought their favorite snacks and treats. We did everything shy of slipping our kids the in-flight whiskey as a sleep-aid. And we made it.
5. Bring Thou Reinforcements
We brought two Grandmas to France and it's made everything from grocery shopping to bedtimes to date nights easier and more fun. Extra hands are the difference between a crazy trip and a crazy trip that approaches (though still rarely reaches) restfulness. Because in reality, there are two options for trips with young kids:
Your Family + Big Trip = Fun, enriching, and exhausting
Your Family + Big Trip + Grandma = Fun, enriching, and less exhausting
Now, if it came right down to it, I’d still travel even if we didn’t have help, but the potential gain is worth trying for. If you don’t have grandparents who are willing and able, all is not lost.
Who in your life might be a good travel buddy? A babysitter? A kid-loving friend? A preschool teacher? (seriously - we have friends who do this) Who would be fun and helpful with little ones? Could you buy (or travel-hack) someone’s tickets and lodging in exchange for a few days of childcare per week? With a little creativity, you might be surprised how doable this is.
Summary
There you have it. Henceforth, thou, thine kin, and thy quest shalt not be vanquished!
Know Your Family. Travel Slowly. Travel for Free. Prep Like a Champion. Bring Reinforcements.
In other words, Gird Thy Loins - and then have fun, you adventurous family.
You can do this!
Travel With Young Kids - Why?
So I guess we’re living in the south of France right now.
A few weeks ago, we bid adieu to the US and chartered a plane to the land of baguettes. After a blur of trains, exhaustion-induced naps, and a fitful night of jet lag, we woke up to soft glow of Provencal sun thawing our frozen Minnesotan bones.
For my wife and I, it’s been a breath of fresh air for our "parent-tired" souls.
Resurrecting Adventure
Personally, it’s been the synthesis of two seemingly-opposing sides of me: Adventurous Brett and Parent Brett.
For Adventurous Brett, the need for big, unique experiences lies somewhere between oxygen and food. But just as I was hitting my stride with world travel in my twenties, I kicked off my thirties by having three kids in two years (Three kids. Two years. … yep).
In the blink of an eye, I transformed from world-traveling-wannabe-real-estate-mogul to housebound-changer-of-diapers. There’s been joy these last five years but let’s just say Adventurous Brett has been on life support.
So despite the real challenges that traveling with little people presents, we decided that now was the time to emerge from the “baby years cave”, peek out through our dark-circled eyes, and see if the world was still there - even though we’ve still got three kids under age six.
For some, a big trip with young kids is obvious (“OF COURSE that's a great idea. We're on our way to Patagonia with two toddlers in tow right now!") For others, particularly parents in the throes of potty training, pre-school, and all the rest, the value may be less obvious.
Isn’t a trip with kids 10x the hassle (and cost) and 1/10th the fun?
I won’t sugarcoat it - this trip is not sipping Rosé on the beach all day while my kids fan me with cool air and appreciation. But as a man who types this sentence with hot espresso in hand and a cool Mediterranean breeze on my face, I can tell you that it's been worth it. Here’s how we thought about it.
Why We Traveled with Kids (Four Reasons)
1. This is the Time!
Two super-Grandmas overlooking the Luberon Valley
In my last post, I made the point that windows of opportunity don’t last forever.
Would it be easier to travel with older kids? Maybe. Sure, flights without tantrums and minute-by-minute-needs would be nice.
On the other hand:
How long until summer basketball and can’t-miss friend birthday parties takes over? (“I don’t WANT to go to Paris! I want to go rollerskating at Jonny’s party!”)
How long will your remote work situation last? How long will credit card companies dole out insane bonuses? How long until the next pandemic/invasion/etc/etc makes your trip impossible?
How many more years will grandparents have the ability and desire to tag along?
The trip you’ve been dreaming of for your family might be easier tomorrow - or it might not.
2. Parent Space
Life is tough. For me, my thirties have been a transition from "innocence to experience".
Hint on our town: It’s where a certain famous painter famously cut off a certain hearing organ…
Whether your life includes a year with reflux-laden twins or just surviving the isolation of a global pandemic, life puts all of us through the grinder at some point.
How do you stay positive and intentional in difficult times? How do you keep your marriage afloat when date nights have been replaced by passing screaming babies back and forth? How do you avoid the learned helplessness that threatens whenever we feel a loss of control in our lives?
A book could be written on the topic of walking well through life’s difficulties (here’s a good one).
For me, a good place to start is simply with space. When we travel we get a chance not to escape our lot in life, but to step back and evaluate what our lives have become- the good, the bad and the ugly.
As I watched the sun rise over the Rhone last week, I remembered back to those difficult early days of being a parent. I reflected on how far we'd come. I asked God what might be next - and I was open to an answer.
How do you get that kind of space to work on and not just in your life?
3. Opportunity to Grow
After 20 hours of trains, planes, and automobiles, my family was exhausted. We had arrived minutes earlier in our destination city’s train station. The last leg should have been a peaceful 20 minute walk along the river to our new home. Only it wasn't peaceful. It was raining. And it wasn't twenty minutes. Turns out with kids (especially tired, wet kids) you need to triple the Google Maps estimate.
To make it with all of our luggage, we needed our boys to not only make the 1-mile walk in the rain but also carry their suitcases while doing it. If this had been a few years ago, my boys would have simply sat down on the sidewalk and cried - and we would have been screwed.
Instead, our hardy little men recognized what we needed them to do, dug deep, and they made the walk. Through soaking rain, through up-all-night-weariness, they did it. I was amazed and I was proud.
On this trip, we’ve all been forced to be flexible, try new things, and even rely on one another. This has been a major life experience for all of us.
And with shared experiences being the glue that bonds people together, what greater gift can you give your family?
4. Beware the Coast
I'm not talking about the Cote D’Azure here.
The first chunk of life is usually where all the action happens. The nature of the school years is one of constant dynamism - a constant barrage of new friends, locations and lessons learned.
Beyond the classroom, things tend to slow down. Whether it’s marriage and kids or just the slow inevitability of age, the vigorous spontaneity of youth often gives way to an unplanned, unspoken "coast" as we float down whatever stream our twenties have brought us to.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if there was a way to stay flexible in the face of monotony? To stay intentional even while more and more of our days give way to obligation? What if we could reverse the shrinking of our idea of “possible” - not just for us, but for our whole family?
Traveling with kids is more than just a few fun pictures next to the Eiffel Tower. Travel jars us loose from the idea that our lives are some passive tram ride (which, let’s be honest- parenting can totally lull you into). A new place is often all that we need to remember that we are active participants on the open road of existence, partnering with God to make a difference in our families and a make dent in this world with the years that we have.
Conclusion
Have I convinced you to consider the crazy idea of traveling, even and especially with those high-maintenance love sponges we call our kids?
I hope so. But even if you are brave enough, I should tell you - there are some essentials you’ll need if you want to avoid mid-flight meltdown or regret in Rejkjavik.
That’s what we'll tackle in our next post.