The joys of travelling with kids in tow
There’s an upside to baby jet lag, plus other surprise benefits of fatherhood
I was five days old the first time I flew. My memory of the trip, from Edmonton to Norman Wells, N.W.T., is nonexistent really, but as the son of an itinerant airline employee, travelling was a regular feature of my childhood. While my friends loaded into station wagons for long road trips, we boarded 737s, DC-10s and de Havilland Beavers for our family vacations (the transportation was different, but motion sickness was universal).
Looking back, there’s a pretty clear line between that peripatetic upbringing and my career as a food and travel writer. There was a time when I spent about half of each year on the road and it was while travelling that I met my wife, a professional traveller herself. That led, as these things often do, to my becoming a father. Now we’ve got two kids and introducing them to the wider world has given me a whole new perspective on what it means to travel.
I’ve come to love baby jet lag, for example. On a trip to London, my daughter decided that 4:30 a.m. was a perfectly reasonable hour to be as awake as humanly possible. So, rather than suffer in the hotel room, I packed her into the stroller and we watched Covent Garden come to life in the blue light of dawn. It has become a tradition now for us to make an early morning walk part of discovering each new city we visit.
My daughter was four months old when we took her on her first adventure outside Canada: an extended road trip from Arizona to California, where we dipped her feet in the Pacific Ocean and pushed her in the stroller around Joshua Tree. She’s a lovely, ebullient sixyear-old now, but she was grouchier than a hornet when she was a baby. That’s why I remember so clearly that it was at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix that she laughed, properly laughed, for the first time.
Since then, she’s crossed Canada several times (her grandparents live in B.C.), visited Europe, the U.K., Greenland and the Caribbean, and has developed a genuine appreciation for quality hotel bathrobes. My son was born in 2019, and despite losing half his potential travel time (and his ability to fly with us for free) to the pandemic, he has still managed to visit Sweden, Norway and Portugal.
Travelling with kids comes with its challenges, of course, and we’ve had our share of jetlag-induced tantrums and inflight meltdowns. The latter has made me much more forgiving of crying kids on airplanes. Whereas I used to grow irritated by the noise, now I just feel bad for the poor kid, even worse for the exasperated parents and relieved it’s not one of mine making the racket.
Any challenges are more than compensated by the rewards, though. We became good friends with a family in Hope Town on the Bahamian island of Abaco after our daughter befriended two schoolgirls about her own age. My son, inspired by his desire to play in the waves, managed his first tentative steps on Falésia Beach in Albufeira, and now that beautiful stretch of sand is permanently etched in our family history.
For all the difficulties that travelling with kids presents, they can also confer some superpowers. When you speak the language in a particular country, it gives you access to that place in a way other tourists might not have. Kids do that, too. In Europe especially, although I’ve witnessed the same thing in Asia, babies and young children are revered by strangers in a way they aren’t really here.
I’ll never forget stopping at a small café after a long day of hauling my daughter in a baby carrier around Seville. When I finally unbuckled her, a group of abuelas sitting nearby spent a blissful 15 minutes passing her around, cooing and fawning, while my wife and I enjoyed our café con leche in peace.
The truth is we dedicate little of our vacation time to kid-specific activities. One of the worst travel decisions I ever made was booking a week at a wellreviewed, all-inclusive resort in the Algarve. All-inclusives are not really my, or my wife’s, preferred type of vacation, but I thought the abundance of children’s amenities would give us a break and be fun for our kids. I was wrong.
My son was too young to participate and my daughter grew tired of the kiddie pools. We ended up spending more time off property than on it, searching out remote beaches and medieval castles, and giving our kids a sense of the place, instead of the generic resort experience they could’ve had anywhere.
As a family, we’re starting to take our first baby steps back into the world of travel and recently took our kids to a new hotel for a bit of a staycation. At one point, while they were running around like maniacs, getting into everything and generally being a huge nuisance, I turned to my wife and said, “These kids are driving me up the wall, but if they weren’t here, I’d miss them.”