Will you have a holiday if you travel with kids?
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I read the guest blog on Travel Rants entitled “Can kids travel?“. I’ve been thinking about my rather negative response pasted below. “I am not sure about encouraging families with young kids to travel. We went to Greece when our twin sons were just over one year old. The brake on the twin buggy was broken off during transit, so we had to hold onto the buggy at all times. Our accommodation had a flagged stone floor. As our sons couldn’t walk, only crawl they basically had to stay in their cots when we were indoors out of the sun. The only opportunity they had to crawl around was on the beach for short time in the mornngs before the sand became too hot. We were limited in the number of toys we could take with us. I found the holiday very stressful as our sons would play around happily all day at home on the carpeted floor with their large assortment of toys. The flight back was awful as they both cried for the whole 3 hour flight. Sorry to say this but your life, especially with regard to travel, does change when you have kids, especially twins.”
I thought how could I turn that experience into postive advice for parents. I am struggling to be achieve this. For example most accommodation in countries with warmer climes than the UK has hard stone or marble flooring, potentially dangerous for crawlers and todlers. I don’t know what you can do if a baby or young child, that you can’t really ask what is wrong or reason with, cries for a long period. Perhaps travelling with a young baby would be easier, they sleep more and are not mobile. One child is probably going to be easier than two but you can’t bank on that. Please tell me if you have had trouble free travel with kids and were you just lucky or was it down to precision planning?
January 28th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
We’ve been travelling with the little guys since the first one was a few weeks old and I think that’s the key thing. Get them used to travelling and they don’t learn that they’re supposed to be a pain.
Even though the initial holiday with our first was only via a car trip, we’ve never had any bother with him on planes or boats since then. He was under two on his first boat and plane trips.
Hadn’t actually thought that stone floors would be a problem. Our place has them and we’ve not done anything special for the little guy who was born here and who has been crawling round on those floors ever since he could crawl.
We’d expected problems with the stairs here as there are several of them but the building is so large (it’s a 10 bedroom hotel plus 5 bedroom house) that by the time he’d discovered them, he seemed to manage them fine and never fell down them whereas ‘tother little guy who was brought up ’til he was 2 in a much smaller place (ie a normal house) managed to fall down the stairs a couple of times (makes us sound like awful parents, doesn’t it?).
January 28th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
I think that travelling by car is easier tha flying with kids. You can carry more with you than on a plane. If your child needs attention you can stop and park the car and attend to your child and at least your child’s crying is not heard by 200 other passengers.
I should have mentioned that the stone floor in our accommodation was textured and very uneven not good for crawlers knees!.
February 2nd, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Also by taking them in a car, you are not annoying your fellow plane passengers if your kid uncharacteristically decided to scream his or her head off for the entire flight or run riot. ;-)