Table of Contents
To Dave, Jonah, and Lucas,
who make it all so much fun.
Introduction
Sarah Franklin
Prekids, my husband and I were that clich of the thirtysomething childless couple, traveling here, there, and everywhere, with just a copy of The New Yorker and the latest iPod as accessories. Lest you assume Im exaggerating our itinerant ways for the sake of a story, heres a list of the trips we made from our home in Seattle the year before our firstborn arrived: Alaska; Hawaii; England and Wales; California; Portland, Oregon; and New York (twice). Oh, and a weeklong road trip to the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, just for good measure.
We traveled by plane, train, and automobile (the automobile in question being our Kids? What kids? cream convertible Beetle). We journeyed for business and pleasure. We vacationed en masse and deux. We partook in all activities we could think of, from off-Broadway theater and holistic spa days to snowboarding and surfing. We danced til dawn in San Francisco and spent lazy mornings enjoying brunch with the newspaper.
In that last prekids year, with every trip we took wed look at each other and say, with a mixture of query and reassurance, We can still do all this with the baby, you know.... Yeah, we were that clich, too: the couple who assumes that our baby, born into a mobile world, will automatically become a mobile baby, fitting neatly into our universe in his/her hipster pouch/sling/backpack, scaling Mount Kilimanjaro with us with nary a peep about altitude sickness.
Ha! Sure, you can travel with a kid. Just dont expect it to be quite the same. In the year after Jonah was born, we held on to our determination to keep on traveling. Okay, so packing for a trip now took a week rather than half an hour, interspersed with algorithm-defying calculations of the precise number of diapers required for a ten-hour plane journey, and just how long a three-hour road trip would really take once wed factored in nursing breaks. The New Yorker and the iPods were replaced by Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? and Philadelphia Chickens.
Still, we got out and aboutby the time Jonah was a year old, hed crossed the Atlantic four times, been up to Whistler, B.C., for a week, and taken several weekend minibreaks within Washington State. Not quite the same pace as in the in utero months, but not bad. The destinations themselves, however, were only half the story. As any parent will tell you (and did tell us; not that we listened), traveling with a wee one is the time in which the old saying Its the journey, not the destination, that matters really comes true. Getting to your destination can be an adventure in and of itself.
Our own experiences of the pre- and postbaby trips made me hungry to hear how others had fared. In yet another clich of our generation, the individualist in me was keen to find company; surely we werent the only people for whom the word vacation had entirely changed in significance postkids?
The women in this collection answered this question with a resounding No!, and then some. They proved that not only was I not alone, but that I wasnt even remotely intrepid. Sarah Davies takes the concept of babys first flight to new extremes in her story of flying a two-seater plane across Arizona with her three-month-old as copilot. Elena Aitken braves the high seas in a thirty-nine-foot sailboat with toddler twins, an arrangement that can make any mother shudder in anticipation of all that could go wrong. And Amy Bustraan, in a tale sure to make the most hardened outdoors folk pause, kayaks the rapids with her six-month-old daughter bobbing along in her booster seat.
Sometimes the trips occurred out of necessity rather than careful planning. Julie Bartons tale of babys first road trip, involving her premature son, abreast pump with a life of its own, and a freeway full of truckers, is as poignant as it is hilarious. In the same vein, Susan Wolter Nettell tells of taking a six-hundred-plus-mile midwinter train journey from Minnesota to South Dakota with preemie quads, helping her younger sister, the newly overwhelmed mother, bring her babies home. Both of these journeys make for equally touching and hair-raising reading. And as unforeseen road trips go, not many beat Donna Collins Tinsleys story of fleeing Hurricane Frances with a toddler, three teenage daughters, and a motley assortment of pets.
In other cases, trips were not spontaneous events but the result of careful forethoughtand still result in outcomes that have us howling in despair and delight. Julia Littons Consider Atlanta will have many readers nodding in rueful recognition with her account of the Thanksgiving trip that almost wasnt, a theme that continues with true Christmas holiday style in Holly Korbeys Seven Bags, Two Kids, and the Baby Cheeses and Mary Jane Beaufrands Flashdance Snow White.
It seems that theres no end to the variety of situations that can spell disaster when traveling with your beloved offspring. Staying close to home and re-creating the vacations of your own childhood or taking your little darlings to favorite haunts doesnt stave off the mishaps, as Sally Bjornsen, Sabra Ciancelli, and Elizabeth Roca show us. Going abroad just adds a different element of the unexpected to the trip, whether its in Laos (Willow King), Ecuador (Gabrielle Smith-Dluha), or Niger (Jennifer Margulis). Even a visit to Graceland can be cringe-inducing when one of your party is determined to point out just how dull he finds The King, as Tiffany Fitchs hilarious All Shook Up recounts.
Traveling with young children, then, is really an embodiment of the broader life changes that occur when you move from person to parent. Your destination, journey times, suitcase contents, are all determined by the needs of someone other than yourself. Moreover, your own enjoyment of the trip depends on getting these details right in the face of eternal variables. For those of us faintly hoping that travel becomes easier when the wee ones turn into bigger ones and are able to actually appreciate their surroundings and the gift of travel, think again. The sagas related by Dana Standish, Donna Gephart, and Ivy Eisenberg demonstrate all too clearly that preteens and teenagers can be just as interesting to travel with as the weenies, even if Dora the Explorer has been swapped for the Paris edition of Vogue.
So what makes us do it?
In recent years, gas prices notwithstanding, Americans have been traveling more and more. In 2006, 38.3 million people were estimated to have traveled more than fifty miles for Thanksgiving week alone. Thats a lot of people traveling with a lot of children. Overseas travel is also on the rise. In 2005, nearly 2.9 million American residents traveled to foreign destinations with their children, according to statistics from the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries. Clearly, despite the pain of packing, despair at the destination, and the obstreperous offspring, travel with our families offers us something valuable that we just cant get at home.
That mysterious something can be found throughout these stories, even among the more hideous details of projectile vomit and frantic potty stops: Traveling, very simply, makes indelible memories that, for better or for worse, are the stuff of family bonding. Think about your own childhood for a moment, and I ll guarantee that youll start to giggle (or groan) at a long-hidden remembrance of a particularly painful trip or a recurring journey you were forced to make each year, which has now become as integral to your formative years as learning your ABCs.
