Now that I have a kid, I’m not sure I could agree that your own life shouldn’t stop when you become a parent. This might work for people who are way more hardcore about homeschooling/unschooling and a generally more nontraditional existence, but not me. My life has changed, a lot. But I do like to think that you can still do some of the things you used to do before the kid, you just have to adjust your expectations. For example, international travel! In case you totally fear doing this with your child, it is possible, and it can even be great.
We just came back from two and a half weeks in central Europe. Maeve is four and a half and hasn’t been in school for the whole summer, so her tolerance for structure is pretty slim at the moment. We took advantage of this on our trip, with flexible bedtimes and stuff. Some other things that helped us enjoy our trip:
-Being middle class. It’s pretty hard to do this well on a shoestring, in our experience. You have to be willing to spend a little more for some of the conveniences, but I think it evens out because you will not blow all your money on bar tabs or even tons of cultural activities. Why?
-Scale. One cultural institution a day was our limit. Even with conscientious preparation, little “assignments” (see how many dogs you can count in the paintings, find the flowers in the stained glass, etc.), and a stash of hard candy to dole out in the wilder moments, Maeve did not tolerate a lot of museum-browsing. The rest of the day you look for a playground or a park, linger over meals with your one or two delicious but not drunk-inducing beers, let the kid be the guide for a while. Because really, French gardens are still interesting, and playgrounds with equipment like giant wooden bees are also something new. It is a bonus to figure out where the resident expats take their kids, and then you can make friends while they all play.
About this I’d also like to say that even if you are not doing 30 castles back to back in a day, you are still being surrounded by a different culture and that in and of itself makes it worth it for me.
-Hotels. I think it was a totally worthwhile expense to stay not in the backpacker dives we might once have enjoyed but pensions with breakfast, decent private bathrooms, and more quiet atmospheres. Odds are you will not be out late with a kid, so having a place that’s comfortable in the evenings is nice for all.
-Some technology. A laptop with a bunch of entertainment pre-loaded is very handy. When you are stuck in the hotel room at night with only Czech game shows and your kid is asleep, you will want “Hot Tub Time Machine” or some other crap to relax with. This is valuable even without an internet connection (and in fact maybe you want to leave that behind while you travel), in case somebody gets sick, or the weather gets bad. Additionally, we have an iPod touch that I stocked with several episodes of an old Moomin animation, a ton of vintage Gumby cartoons, a Tinkerbell movie, and a selection of quasi-educational games. This we used mostly in restaurants when the fun of coloring wore off, because in a beer garden on a perfect late summer day, you want to linger… and not chase your kid constantly…
-Trains and buses and boats, oh my. Renting a car is for suckers unless you really have to, at least in Europe or Japan. It is a lot of fun to hop on the streetcar in Prague, or take the funicular, or have your daily gelato on a boat down the Danube. Every day a different means of getting around!
-Snacks. I personally love grocery shopping anywhere, anytime, especially while traveling. Visiting the supermarket or a farmer’s market is a perfectly reasonable cultural experience in my book. We stopped at the markets whenever we had a chance, and letting Maeve look at the different cuts of meat, shapes of bread, etc. was always fun. She usually got to help choose some of the snacks. And this is a way that we ensured she was getting something decent to eat each day instead of just sausages and gelato on the street. Which she would have been perfectly happy with.
-Coloring books. Maeve is a coloring freak these days, which I know not every kid is. The way we kept this exciting was to pick up a new coloring book or two every place we went. In Bavaria there’s a one-euro store called TEDi (which has a lot of other weird and interesting cheap junk by the way), so we got a malbuch and even a Disney princess book that had all the captions in German. It was fun talking about Schneewitchen. Coloring got us through a lot of restaurant and train times, and even was great for hotel relaxing.
-The stroller. Four and a half is pretty big for a stroller, but this was the Maclaren’s final hurrah, we think, and completely worth it. It even handled the cobblestone sidewalks and European dog merde effortlessly. It was great for making museum and castle visits a little more tolerable, plus we could sometimes chuck our bag or jacket underneath it, or in it when Maeve wanted to walk.
-Flexibility. Other than a basic plan for what towns/hotels we’d be in and when, It was a lot easier for us to decide each day what we wanted to do when we got up, based on the weather, how we’d slept, and what we learned about the options once we got there. I had a short list of things I hoped to do, but I didn’t get too attached, and in the end, I did manage to do everything on the list. One day in Prague, it was a national holiday and a lot of stuff was closed. We hadn’t figured that in, but we made a day trip out of it, to the town of Tabor, and it was great.
So with one kid, we did make a few weeks in Europe a really good time for everybody. Maybe I’m writing this because I hope some of my friends in Michigan will travel with us one of these days, I don’t know, but really, it is worth a try.
Photos on Flickr as soon as I make the Dubai internet cooperate.
