Summer is here and time is right for dancing in the streets. Well,
maybe not, if you have little kids under your supervision. But thatdoesn’t mean you can’t have a great vacation with kids. In so many
ways, time off with kids is more meaningful and enriching than a week
on the beach without them ever could be.
The first rule of thumb
for planning any family adventure is to figure out what will work for
the entire family. Normally, I’m not one for saying that having kids
should hold you back from doing the things you love to do. To the
un-ending misery of fellow travelers, we took our babies on 12 hour
plane trips to the other side of the world where we let them sleep on
our laps while we ate long gourmet meals. We refused to let their tiny
existence ruin our plans, and they often did not throw up or even break
too many things. But now that they are older and have opinions and
their own desires, we have to admit that things are more complicated. Here are a few things we learned along the way:
Traveling with Toddlers
I’ll
surprise you when I say that a trip to Disneyland, World, or other orb,
is a must-do for any dad with a three to four year old. To see a child
enter into magic kingdom before they are old enough to understand gross
commercialism is enough to truly make any 40 year old man feel like a
kid again. Miss it during these years and you may as well skip it for
life. After five, it just becomes a junk food fueled whinerama quelled
only by purchase of a $40 snow globe or goofy hat (whether literally
Goofy or not).
Resist the temptation to plan long road trips,
visiting ante bellum mansions in the South, or long drives to see our
nation’s Baseball parks with a toddler. Toddlers do not hold up well in
car unless under anesthesia and no amount of Backyardigans videos will
temper their road nausea once they have experienced it. You do not
want to be 1000 miles from home when your child gets sick. Once it
happens, you will get a reminder of that feeling about every 500 yards.
Surprisingly,
big cities make good vacations with little kids since you can often
walk them around different spots, sticking them in strollers. New York,
Boston, San Francisco and Chicago are great cities for walking holidays
that provide a lot to see just by wandering from place to place on
foot. Unfortunately, most other U.S. cities are too spread out to tour
in this way.
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