If you have children with whom you've vacationed, you have at least one "nightmare" travel story. It happens to all of us, and, the one thing we can be assured of is that it will continue to happen. Your vacation will run amuck in some way: your progeny will be embarrassingly ungracious in front of relatives and strangers alike; after an excellent first ski, they will brutally bruise a shin re-boarding the boat and be unable to waterski for the remainder of the planned all-day activity; they will whine incessantly in the backseat about sibling "side encroachment"; they will pee on your sister's heirloom quilt as you change their diaper on the bed like you have a thousand times before at home without incident; they will leave a precious stuffed animal behind in a hotel room but not realize it for another 2 days when there is no hope for its retrieval; they will request an emergency bathroom break after you've passed the last rest stop for 50 miles; they will become annoyed with the friend (their friend!) you've brought along on vacation to make it more fun for them.
You too will will contribute to the amuck-running by virtue of faulty map navigation that adds an extra hour of drive time to a 6-hour drive day; you will learn that half of your family is allergic to horses at the 30-minute mark of a 2-hour trail ride; you will unintentionally book a room at a hotel that is hosting twenty U-14 boys soccer teams, all of whom are watching their televisions very late into the evening at max volume.
There is a silver lining: the "horror" of these experiences fades over time, leaving excellent stories that will be referenced at the dinner table for years.
Meanwhile, until that perspective is gained, among things I've found that made travel with kids easier.
- Travel with another family so your kids have playmates. The vacations my kids remember most fondly are those taken with family friends and relatives where they had same-age companions. These were fun for us parents as well, as we didn't need to be the sole sources of entertainment all the time.
- Plan an itinerary that's mostly all-family activities, but with a few stops that meet individual kid's specific interests. This way, there's something for everyone, but there's also a lot of shared experiences. Model patience and flexibility so that your kids learn to be tolerant of participating in activities they might not choose for themselves and develop resilience when things don't live up to expectations.
- Let kids play with video games or watch movies during drive and or flight time, limiting technology use when it's important that they be active participants. For example, we have a family rule that there's no technology use (phones, gaming devices, computers) when we're inside the boundaries of a National Park. It applies equally to us adults too!
- Shop before vacation for books, games, movies and gadgets for each child to parcel out throughout the trip to smooth over challenging/boring bits. Include some items that are educational or creative. For our family, that meant Magic School Bus books/DVDs, Professor Layton 3DS games, puzzle books, and key-ring games like Boggle and 20 Questions.
- Find a good book to read-aloud to the whole family during car rides to break up screen-time and introduce your kids to good literature. The Harry Potter books were being released as my kids were growing up... they offered enough action and suspense to make everyone want to hear another chapter, and another, instead of wanting to get back to their Pixters and Nintendo DSes. Other worthy reads include:
- The Anybodies by N.E. Bode
- Paul Stewart's Far Flung Adventures series
- All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
- Tolkien's The Hobbit
- Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series
- Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society
- Kaye Umansky's Solomon Snow series
- The Last Dragon by Silvana De Mari
- From the Mixed-Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
- Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series
The toughest ages to travel with, in my experience, were the 1-4's and 12-15's. The youngers don't have great stamina and need a lot of attention. For us, ideal vacations for this age range were those that included grandparents in some way. They were glad to help share some of the child care responsibilities, spelling us for a bit. On the other end of the spectrum, tweens and early teens can be thankless travelers. Throw them a bone and vacation with others who have kids, or skew the activities to high action/high-interest. This is a good time to include a theme park in the mix, or a special theatrical production (think Cirque du Soleil), or one-of-a-kind experience (swimming with manta rays). But, don't make it all about them either. Make them join you on that 3 mile round trip hike to an alpine meadow, or to go see that glass-blowing demonstration, or get out of the car for that photo op at the Continental Divide. They may not appreciate it while they're in the midst of it, but all of my kids have said that later, in retrospect, they were glad for the experiences their travels with us afforded them.