#12: Traveling with children: our best, and worst, experiences
TL;DR: 18 month olds are the worst.
This week’s newsletter was inspired by our recent trip to visit my family in Houston for Thanksgiving. One of the perils of living in the PNW is ain’t nothing close to us. Seattle is tucked away in this nice little corner of the country, hundreds of miles away from most anything and at least a several hour flight from the middle of the country. If a teleportation device is ever actually invented that doesn’t accidentally reconfigure your DNA, the only people who will be in line before PNW’ers are folks who live in New Zealand. Anyway, here’s a few short stories about traveling with children and what we found that works, and doesn’t work, with traveling with them.
Most people encounter a wide array of fears about becoming a parent. Maybe it’s an existential fear. Will my children be good, kind people? Will they have any lifelong illnesses? Will they vote for a future Donald Trump? That kind of thing. Of course I had those kinds of fears. But I distinctly remember two fears dominating my thoughts in the days and weeks leading up to our oldest being born.
Will she accidentally poop on me in public at some point?
How does anyone travel with kids?
I will skip the first question because, honestly, we all know the answer to this (yes, kids will poop on you. No, it’s not as bad as it sounds). The purpose of this particular essay is to dive into the second question: traveling with kids does in fact suck (at times) but is usually really really rewarding and not all that bad (at times).
We’ve had the good fortune of dragging our kids on multiple cross country flights, multiple solo flights with 1 kid, many short road trips, and of course our marathon driving trip this year. Through these detailed experiments I have created this 3D matrix in my mind of kid traveling difficulty with age being on the Y axis, duration of trip being on the X axis, and number of kids on the Z axis. I call it the “Cube of Difficulty” and I’d draw it here but you would need some of those fancy VR goggles and honestly all you need to know is traveling with young kids is multidimensional. In light of the fact that this cube is difficult to render, I’ll instead share with you the 3 trickiest travel ages and maybe some strategies for working around them.
Traveling Solo with an 18 month old
I knew that moving to Seattle would limit my opportunities to visit my dad in Shreveport, LA. Shreveport is not an easy place to get to from anywhere but Shreveport. It only has a regional airport, so flights are not cheap. I-20 leads in and out of the city but drives like you’re on some kind of wild road from hell (probably has something to do with Texas drivers coming over the border). So I told Megan that I would take Lil, our oldest, then 18 months old, on a trip to visit Grandpa Bruce. “You’re gonna take an 18 month old on a flight by yourself?”
“Sure!”
And so we went. Fortunately it’s only a 90 minute flight but in those 90 minutes, I tried every trick to keep her sedated and not raising hell.
iPads (they don’t work until they’re about 3)
Sticky notes on the back of the seat (works for about 15 minutes)
Story time (how many f’ing books can you bring on a plane? Like 5 at most)
Two things finally ended up working to keep her shit chill. The little airplane guide in the back of the airplane seat worked wonders. Probably because it folds, contains cartoons, and vaguely resembles the world around them (planes, people, drink carts), Lil was taken by this for about 45 minutes. We kept folding, unfolding. Folding, unfolding. However, she tired of that with about 20 minutes left to go in the flight. I accidentally dropped a small water bottle on the ground and sent 18 month old Lil to go fetch it. Crawling around under the seats turned out to be her favorite past time on the plane. She scurried around under our seats, probably tickling some random ass person’s feet while she searched for the water bottle. At one point I caught her eating some food scrap thing she found on the ground. Fortunately this was about the time the flight attendant came by and politely asked me to uncork my kid from the floor in front of us.
Bonus: ask Megan about the time she flew 18 month old Lil by herself cross country while also in her 2nd trimester. I’ve never heard so much swearing and crying all at the same time.
Long road trips
I should probably just label this “road trips” because traveling in the car with our kids is (was) kinda dreadful. I could also label this “road trips will suck for certain kids, specifically your oldest kid who hates being trapped in anything whilst your youngest kid could be strapped to the roof and she wouldn’t give a shit”. That’s a little too long but whatever.
Our oldest had me convinced that road trips with kids would always be some form of misery. She *hated* being in her carseat for more than 15 minutes. Nothing would console her. So when we had our second kid, I naturally dreaded the idea of being in the car with both of them. But as with multiple kids, I learned a key lesson: assume absolutely nothing based on the experience with the first kid. Where Lil, our oldest, is a tyrant in the car, Nora, our youngest, is super chill. Lil wants constant attention. Nora is content to see the road pass us by. So when we decided to drive 1300 miles to Palm Springs (basically from the northern most part of the west coast to the southern most part) I was full of worry. This road trip is gonna be a disaster.
I am not known as a good vacation planner but in the instance of planning this roadtrip, I planned like I was NASA landing an orbiter on the moon. We did several things to make the road trip not only tolerable, but actually pretty enjoyable:
Load up the iPad. Lots of shows. LOTS. This worked well for Lil, then 4 at the time. But Nora would watch a few 15-20 minutes and then was meh. Interestingly enough, when we made the same exact drive 6 months later, she was much more into watching her shows. The difference between 2 years old and 2 years 6 months can be vast when it comes to attention span
Snacks. Hungry kids are angry kids. Megan made these peanut butter / chia seeds (yes, those chia seeds) / oatmeal / honey balls which were damn delicious. We also had enough gold fish to fill a Costco. Random granola bars, sandwiches, and treats for bribery were clutch too
Stops every 3 hours. We coordinated our stops to find playgrounds to let the kids work out some energy, swing on swings, and marvel at hippies filling water jugs from the headwaters of the Shasta River in Northern California (this was particularly entertaining).
No more than 6-7 hours of driving a day. This was as much for us the parents as it was the kids. I love efficient driving but having 2 kids under 5 in the car adds a dimension of stress that adds up. I can also point to the one time on our road trip where we spent considerably more time in the car than 7 hours (closer to 12 hours in Southern Utah. Yikes) and the next day our kids were solid gold assholes.
What did not work for entertaining the kids: coloring books, drawing utensils, white boards, toys. The things that work when you’re sitting at home and have freedom of movement did not so much work when we were on a 19 hour roadtrip.
Red eye flights
Y’all. This shit was real. Red eye (overnight) flights are hard for anyone. Pre-COVID I would be on a red eye at least once a month (for my trips to Africa it would often be back-to-back red eye flights). I’ve been on dozens in my adult life at this point and even for me they ain’t easy.
For kids? Daaaaamn they ain’t no joke. But it’s not the flight that’s hard. It’s the before and after.
The month before COVID swept over the country like a damn nightmare, we all went to Hawaii. Lil was 3 1/2 and Nora was 18 months old. Going to Hawaii for my southern ass was like one of the most exotic trips imaginable. From the West Coast it’s no big deal. The flight to Hawaii from Seattle is a little over 5 hours and about a 3 hour time difference. This means coming and going for normal adults feels a bit like an international flight. For kids it feels more like an ordeal than driving 19 hours in a car. But again, the flight was the easy part. They slept (ish) the whole time.
The challenge is the flights typically leave around 11pm at night. Our kids bed time (then) was about 7pm. We are *militant* about keeping a stable nap and bed time so this meant keeping the kids up later than normal. This meant running the kids ragged all day (to kill time before the flight) and then keeping them up well beyond their normal bed time. We wandered the entire island of Maui visiting breweries, goat dairies, road side farmers markets all with the idea of wearing the kids out so they’d sleep on the plane.
This method worked pretty well. Our kids were pretty well behaved in the airport and actually slept on the plane. We did it. WE MADE IT.
Except we didn’t really account for landing at 5am (really 2am Hawaii time). We had to rouse the kids from their sleep and then traverse the airport and THEN get our car and set up the car seats and blah blah blah. Getting home at 7am when the kids should have been sleeping but weren’t (and mom and dad were exhausted) ended up being …. ooooof …… tough.
I would love to bestow some wisdom upon you on how to survive overnight flights with young kids but unfortunately I don’t have any.
The Takeaway
I honestly would have thought that air travel with kids would be easier because it significantly reduces how long you’re traveling. But because of the freedom of stopping, bringing random shit, and stopping, the car is the easiest way to transport kids.
What did I miss? What is your experience traveling with kids?
We haven't had the guts to take ours on a plane yet.
We have done road trips with them. I've done 1:1s from Atlanta to Kentucky with each kid and those aren't bad. Both kids were chill with me when it is just the two of us. There's something about when all four of us are in a car that the kids lose their mind and whine way more. They complain exponentially more when mom is in eyesight for some reason.
We do a quarterly 6-7 hour trip to a grandparents' house and have a similar game plan. We plan out stops, have a ton of snacks and a huge bag of books, games, etc. It's all you can do.
Regardless, I related to this post quite a bit. Glad to know we aren't alone.