Category Archives: travel

Surviving Long Car Trips with Kids

December 22, 2009christmas, travelKirsetin

As we settle into the cold of winter, with 4 snow days under our belt already, the excitement is mounting. The boys have gone sledding and skiing. Basketball is in full swing. School break has arrived. This can only mean one thing: Christmas is almost here!

Which also means it’s time for many of us to pile our cars high with our socks and gifts and toys and embark on the joy of holiday travel. Two years ago, when this blog had barely begun, I posted some tips for taking trips with those sweet little, easy-going travelers in car seats. Here’s a review:

1. Lower your expectations. If you expect perfect harmony, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. Even the best laid plans go awry. Know this going in and you’ll be more likely to gracefully deal with mishaps.

2. Be prepared. The Scouts got it right with this motto. You can’t get into the car with your luggage and purse and expect the kids to enjoy the scenery. Bring age-appropriate games & toys. I’d suggest buying one small new toy (or book) for each child, along with a bevy of favorites. Pack a backpack of fun they can dig through along the way.

3. Act like a camel: pack plenty of food and water.

When my kids were in diapers, I brought lots of snacks for desperate moments and we stopped for meals. (An Oreo can buy you several minutes of peace.) Once they were potty trained, I found out that food and water means stopping – again – for the bathroom. Now we pack enough food (snacks, sandwiches, fruit), so we can keep driving until someone NEEDS to stop.

4. Plan on at least 3 extra bathroom stops. Nope, not for the kids. You can blame all those roadside Starbucks.

5. Books on tape. Okay, I realize this sounds like the dark ages to all of you video-in-the-minivan types. But give it a chance. There are some great books on tape (Ralph S. Mouse, Ramona the Great) that everyone can enjoy and they help kids use their imagination, too. Imagine, the picture isn’t right there in front of them! If your kids are old enough, you can even listen to Harry Potter.

6. Songs on tape.
Yikes. I hardly ever do this, but you really good moms out there might engage the kids with a little Raffi. I’d rather play I Spy for the eight-millionth time, but, hey, to each his own. If you can bear it, your kids will love you for it.

7. Stock up on stickers.

If your kids are old enough to use stickers, you can keep them amused for quite some time simply by giving them 1000 stickers to paste in a notebook. For older kids, buy workbooks, travel game books, or print out the License Plate game and some old-fashioned car bingo . Washable markers are a good thing.

8. Remember that this, too, shall pass. One day, you’ll look back on travel with your tykes with fondness. It won’t be long before they’re tweens in their own iPod-driven world.

photo credits: xikita ,

In A Perfect World

November 9, 2009family, home projects, nostalgia, travelKirsetin

A warm, cozy, inviting home is a wonderful thing. If we lived in a world without complicating factors, like jobs and kids and money, I’d be living on the beach somewhere. I’d be sitting on a porch like this tonight, looking at the sunset (because you all know that in that perfect world I wouldn’t be up for the sunrise) and enjoying a lovely glass of red wine .

In this same fantasy, I’d have plenty of time and money to decorate my home, and I’d be really good at it. I wouldn’t feel woefully inadequate every time I peeked at the Inspired Room or flipped through old copies of Cottage Living Magazine, may it RIP.

In my dreamed-up world, our children would run and play and love the beach as much as I do.

And as a couple, we’d laugh and cry together. We’d be sure to make time to create new memories with old friends.

And no matter what, no matter how many business trips or book proposals or football games or soccer games, we’d always find time to travel and create memories for our family.

Not a bad dream world, huh?

Would You Take Your Kids to Great Britain?

October 14, 2009travelKirsetin

Sure, why not?

Well, there’s the airfare, of course, but once you get past that staggering figure, it’s not so bad.

In general my #1 recommendation for travel with kids to faraway places is this: STAY. Stay as long as possible. Get the heck out of that hotel, people. Find a house. It’s bigger. It’s cozier. And it’s probably a heck of a lot cheaper. Once you’ve got the lodging with a kitchen, you’ve just reduced your food bill by a gazillion. And cost is only one benefit. The ease–ease, I’m telling you–of having your own kitchen, living room, and yard!–is priceless. Your kids can roll out of bed and eat cereal without having to get dressed and hauled off to some restaurant. They can relax in a little space of their own during downtime, as can you. They can run around in the yard for hours, and let’s face it, that’s a dangerous proposition in any hotel parking lot.

Here are a few more thoughts for the intrepid family traveler:

Great Britain’s a good starter trip. It’s an easy one with kids, because they speak the same language. I know, I know, they call french fries “chips,” and instead of potato chips, they say “crisps.” But still. Getting around with little kids is fairly easy when you don’t have a language barrier. They may call it the “loo,” but they know what you’re looking for!
Plan ahead. Before you haul your kids across the world, it’s wise to have a general plan of what you’re going to do when you get there. We didn’t have every day mapped out before we left, but we had a good idea of when we’d be where. There were a few things we knew for sure, like when we’d visit Warwick Castle (we needed tickets) and when we’d go to London (needed to catch a train). So have a plan, but be flexible. There were towns we’d never heard of that we ended up exploring for the better part of a day–keep your options open enough to allow for unexpected fun.
Plan for downtime. When we took our kids to Great Britain, we went for 2 weeks over Christmas break. In those two weeks we saw lots of cute towns in the Cotswolds Region, drank with the locals in Frampton on Severn, rode the double-decker red bus in London, went to the London Museum of Art and saw a million other London sites, visited Bath, saw the stone circles in Avebury, toured Gloucester Castle (where some of Harry Potter was filmed!), walked around Shakespeare’s hometown, spent a day at Warwick Castle, spent a few days in Edinburgh, Scotland, and tromped through some amazingly cool abbey and castle ruins in Wales. Still, there were several days where we did nothing, other than walk around our little village and go for groceries! This downtime was essential to all of our stamina–the kids enjoyed not having to get up and go, and we enjoyed not having to get them up to go.
Prepare for jet lag. Do everything you can to start moving your internal clocks to the time zone you’re headed to, but expect the first day or two to be a little tough. We had exciting plans for our first full day in the countryside, but none of us could wake up sufficiently to get going. We started out after lunch instead, and it worked out just fine.
Pack some fun for your kids. If your trip is anything like ours, it will involve a very long plane ride and lots of time in a rental car (on the left side of the road, mind you). While we never once tired of looking out the windows at the amazing sites, our kids were happy to have books, books on tape (for the littlest), papers, and crayons to keep themselves amused. We were glad they had them, too.

And no post about travel would be complete without photos, so here are a few from that fun adventure.