
Eileen Gunn (WSC '93) is an expert on traveling with children. Before she became a mother, Eileen and her husband were adventure-seekers. But upon starting a family, exploring the world became a little more complicated. Since then, Eileen has started a website dedicated to helping families travel with children. It's called
Families Go!.
Today, Eileen offers some interesting advice about traveling with your children (or future children, for you recent grads with a twinkle in your eye). Enjoy.
Guest-post submitted by Eileen Gunn:
Before my
husband and I had our daughter we were fairly adventurous travelers. We kayaked
in the Galapagos, went camping in Vietnam, climbed a volcano in Bali in the
pitch black to see the sunrise from the top, and drove across Mexico in a VW
bug (the old kind).
Then our daughter came along. We still wanted to travel, knew
things had changed and weren’t sure where to begin. So I did what I always did
when I needed parenting information: I turned to the Internet.
Most of what I found was clichéd, unhelpful and fairly
discouraging. There was too much advice on how to “survive” vacations that
revolved entirely around activities only a kid could like, which made me
cringe. Surely it was possible to actually enjoy
family travel, wasn’t it? Equally unhelpful were the über stylish travel bloggers who bragged about taking their
toddlers to 6-course meals at 5-star restaurants. It seemed unrealistic and
unkind to force this button-down adult world on our energetic and curious
child.

There had to be something in between. Most parents I talked
to had similar frustrations, so I started the travel content and information website
I needed and called it
FamiliesGo!.
In the five years I’ve been traveling with my daughter, and
the almost-two years since I launched FamiliesGo!
I’ve learned a lot about traveling with a small child. Here are my best tips:
1. Kids are incredibly resilient if you work with their
schedule. Keep (more or less) to their
normal nap, meal and bed times and they will be more likely to go with the flow
in between. (Getting a local tip on a good playground helps, too.)
2. Kids are kids. Even when you are on vacation babies cry,
picky eaters are picky, toddlers need to be watched every second and kids of
all ages get tired, bored, hungry, crabby and sulky. Having to be always on can
make parents feel like they don’t get a vacation. But I find that if you just
accept this reality, work with it and show empathy when the traveling gets
tough (plane and car rides
are long
and boring), then it fades into the background and you do find new ways to
relax.
3. Kids can surprise you. In Puerto Rico this winter we took
our daughter to the rain forest and went on what we thought would be an easy
ten-minute walk to a waterfall. It turned out to be a half-hour of hilly
hiking. Our child, who can’t walk three blocks in the city without claiming
she’s tired, scampered along, made up stories, sang songs, picked up sticks,
and waded right into the shallower pools when we got to the falls. Then she
walked back out again without a complaint. Wow!
4. There are lots activities
that we enjoy that our daughter does, too. At local farmers markets we admire
the local vegetables and artisanal breads while she ogles the fruit and fresh
donuts. In Germany we all loved taking gondola rides into the Bavarian alps and
exploring King Ludwig’s castles. Art museums often have family tours that
engage both kids and parents surprisingly well. Art Treks at the Met in New
York are great.
5. Some of the kids activities we most dreaded have turned
out to be fun. We went to a ski lodge this winter that had an indoor water park.
These rank second only to Chuck E. Cheese on my list of dreaded child
entertainment. She was too small for the slides, so we alternated between swimming
in an indoor-outdoor hot tub and bobbing around in a wave pool—not a bad way to
spend a winter afternoon.
6. Kids get bigger. As our daughter has gotten older she’s
gotten less portable and more vocal in her preferences. She no longer falls
asleep in the stroller (allowing us to grab an afternoon beer). But can stay up
later, sit in a restaurant for a reasonable length of time, go to art museums and
amuse herself fairly well on car trips. While she would be happy to go to the
beach or to Disney World on every vacation, she gamely throws herself into city,
camping and ski vacations, too.
One way or another we’ve managed to enjoy all our family
vacations and haven’t had to settle for surviving any of them. I hope you do,
too.
Eileen Gunn (WSC ’93) is putting her journalism degree to
use as the founder of
FamiliesGo!.