That’s the saying, right? Not quite? Well, it is a saying that we use in our house a lot. And we don’t use it in reference to raising children. Instead, it is often used in reference to travel (if that somehow wasn’t obvious).

My husband and I are not fans of many travel guides. Sure, they have beautiful pictures and some good, general advice. But in this day and age, they are outdated almost as soon they are printed. Restaurants and hotels close, admission prices change, monuments are under construction. But for us, guide books are outdated in another way – they don’t take into account cheaper, more rapid travel.

Here’s what I mean… have you ever read a travel book and it suggests you spend an insane amount of time in some tiny town in the middle of nowhere – “in order to really get a deep appreciation of Castelmoron-d’Albret, France, you will need to plan to spend at least two weeks there.” Yeah, no thanks. Don’t get me wrong, you might need a full two weeks to get a deep appreciation of the smallest town in France but very few, non-independently wealthy, childless people have that kinda time. Or patience.

We see the same thing on message boards when looking for tips on our upcoming trips. Someone will chime in and say things like “A couple days in a city, especially Munich and Prague is not nearly enough.” For some people, that might be true. But we don’t have that kind of time. We can’t spend two weeks in Castelmoron-d’Albret – there’s just too much of the world to see! Hell, we’ve been known to traverse whole countries in two days. If we have any free time, and the tickets are cheap enough (yes, there is an informal ratio for this determination) then we just go!

Case in point: we recently came across ridiculously cheap airfare to Munich. Like $300 round trip cheap. Because the airfare was so cheap, we figured we could go for a long weekend (or less than the few days most people think is enough time). So while the journey to Germany will be long, and the stay only a couple of days, it is worth it to us for the experience.

All of this is to say, don’t be intimidated by short trips, especially if the price is right. Everyone assumes that flying to Europe or Asia or South America has to be expensive and time consuming. It doesn’t have to be either. And if you want to be well-traveled and make amazing memories with your children, take a chance on some cheap tickets, even though the journey might be long but the trip short.

Confession time: yes, I stated at one point that we were willing to travel basically anywhere in the world with our children. That wasn’t really the truth, at least not until recently. The thought of hours upon hours in the plane combined with absurd time changes gave even me hives. Until Australia, we would choose one or the other: long transit times or crazy time changes.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my husband was able to score $500 round trip airfare to Sydney. How do you not go when the airfare is that cheap? I had a mini panic attack when we first bought the flights and then a massive panic attack the closer we got. It got so bad that I ended up buying a ton of stuff to keep the kids entertained on the plane – see previous post.

For the first time in our history, and to the utter delight of their parents, the children slept when they were supposed to. It was GLORIOUS! The flight to and from Australia is about 15 hours, not including domestic connections. And of those 15 hours, the girls slept 11 – both ways! They say history repeats itself. Perhaps. But I also completely understand our luck and our luck says that this will only happen once. I’m ok with that though… we took on a challenge and thanks to our ability to wear our kids out, we were rewarded with an amazing, albeit ridiculously long, fun day in the air! I’ll be honest – it was mostly fun for me. I got some sleep, drank some alcohol, and enjoyed 11 hours without having to entertain the children.

Our trip overall was just so, so much fun. I was a little apprehensive about taking on such a monstrous trip after we had such a rough time in Ecuador. But, I just took our family motto to heart (“Suck it up and deal!”) and made it work. Now, that’s not to say that everything went perfectly. We definitely learned something on this vacation. Previously, we would always try to stay up as long as possible, trying to stave off jet lag. We’ve had varied results with this approach so we decided to try something new – we would all take a nap and then grab dinner in an attempt to get to a time zone appropriate bedtime. When we tried to wake up our youngest from said nap, she was so tired that she worked herself into a frenzy and started vomiting. Abort mission! Abort mission! Poor kid. In the end, we let both the kids sleep, which they did until early the following morning.

What does this mean for future trips?? Well, first, it opens so many more doors. I love Asia and would love for my children to experience it for themselves. Now that I know they can handle the long flight, I am going to start taking those $500 12 night China trip deals much more seriously.

One final thing, mostly as a side note. In my last post, I mentioned some of the things that we were bringing to keep our children entertained (which we didn’t really end up needing because they slept so much!). The big winner of the bunch? The pipe cleaners! The kids LOVED them and were enthralled with them for most of the time they weren’t passed out.

At least, that’s what my husband put as a joke on our itinerary for our upcoming trip to Australia. He thinks he’s funny.

Unfortunately, for this trip, it is pretty accurate. We are flying from Chicago to Sydney, which means that we really do get to spend basically a day in the air. Perhaps surprisingly, this will not be the longest trip our girls have taken in regards to total travel time – a few years back we went to Easter Island, which was 28 hours of total travel time. But this flight will represent the longest single flight they have taken. And to make matters worse, it is a well known secret that I hit my air time limit right around 12 hours. The flight will be 15 hours for the single leg from LAX to SYD. It’s going to be an adventure!

We need a way to keep two children busy for 15+ hours. As much as it pains me to say it, I wish that an iPad would suffice. It won’t. The one time I would allow my kids to watch as much TV as they want, they watch for 30 minutes before getting bored.

What about sleep, you ask? Yeah, well we learned on our first international trip that the girls will not sleep when you think they should. Rather, they fall asleep about 10 minutes before the flight lands and you are forced to carry them, along with all the luggage, through immigration, customs, and a seemingly never ending airport (and obviously, your plane arrives at the gate furthest away from everything).

Anyway, through our various trips we have discovered some tricks that work and keep the kids busy on flights. We have tried a number of different things and now humbly offer up some suggestions that have worked for us in the past.

• Tablets: love ’em or hate ’em, they are a godsend on long flights. Just make sure that you download media that the KIDS select, otherwise, it will be all for naught. 

• Crayons/Paper/Stickers: easy, small, time consuming. Pro-tip – either get triangle crayons or a crayon roll to make sure they aren’t constantly falling off the tray table. Here is a tutorial to make your own crayon roll, if you are so inclined. Which I am not. 

• Workbooks: what I like most about these is that they are cheap and offer a bunch of different activities from crosswords and word searches to math problems and mazes.

• Pipe cleaners: super cheap and light item. You can find instructions online to make all sorts of fun and interesting crafts. It will keep kids busy for hours.

• Magnetic games: like these!

Now, I have a whole list of things that didn’t work if you’d like those as well. When our kids were younger, we used to get a bunch of stuff at the dollar store or in the dollar section at Target. Then, we would just pull out a new toy when they got bored with the old one. It worked, for a little bit – 30 toys lasted about 20 minutes. But then we ended up with a bunch of crap that we didn’t need.

The key is to find things that your child finds interesting and will keep her busy. Otherwise, that job falls to you.

My last post talked about how we decide where we are going to travel. Actually, it talked more about the lack of thought that goes into any of our trips. But the husband reminded me of another great resource we use when we wrote about our trip to Ecuador in the blog that he maintains (insert shameless plug for Odd Travels!! ) so I thought I would expand more, especially because we get this question a lot:

Do you do where you want to go or do you follow the deals?

The answer is both, although, to be honest, we mostly follow the deals. As I mentioned in my last post, there aren’t many places we won’t visit so the options are pretty limitless. So, what happens when we have vacation time but haven’t found a deal that works? Well, that’s when we turn to Google Flights. If you aren’t familiar with Google Flights yet, I could not be more excited to make the introduction!

If you have a destination in mind, you can use this site to search for flights. But where Google Flights REALLY shines is when you have no idea where you want to go. It basically opens up the whole world, which I think is pretty dang cool.

So how does it work? You put in your starting point, you add your dates (or you can choose a more flexible period of time to search), and then, the BEST PART: YOU PUT IN YOUR PRICE RANGE. See, I get excited just thinking about it. If you are dying to get out of town but have limited funds, give this tool a try!

Let’s try a real life example. Just for fun, let’s see where our family can go over Thanksgiving. I mean, we have 2.5 free days of vacation and an extended family that loves to travel.

Oh look!

We can go to Barcelona over Thanksgiving for $345 per person. I think that you now know where you will find us eating our Thanksgiving meal.

Google flights is amazing for those times where the travel deals just don’t line up with the dates you want to escape your traditional life. It’s even fun to play around with when you need to daydream for a bit.

I thought that the first thing I would throw out into the universe is our travel strategy. You know, things we think about when considering where to go, when to go, how to get there, etc.

Ok, who am I kidding? We don’t have a strategy. Here is how trips get booked in our house. Let me set the scene: it’s around 9:30pm and I’m watching Parks and Rec on Netflix in bed. My husband is in the living room doing some work.

Husband: I just got an email for $500 airfare to Australia!
Me: When would we have to go?
Husband: June, July, and/or August.
Me: We could make that work.
Husband: You need to talk me out of this.
Me: … (all while thinking, who the hell does he think he is talking to? Does he even know me? Has 9 years of marriage taught him nothing? If he wants to be talked out of $500 airfare to Australia, he is clearly barking up the wrong tree).

20 minutes later …

Husband: Ok, we are booked for July.

And, scene.

That is our strategy. Where can we go for cheap so that we can travel as much as possible while not being fired from the jobs that pay for our travel? That’s not to say that we will go anywhere. There are several locations I would like to visit but want the girls to be older and better adept at evaluating their surroundings. But for the most part, we look for the deals.

We have two sites that we mainly use when looking for deals: Travel Zoo and Scott’s Cheap Flights. Travel Zoo has a number of great deals but the best ones come out on Wednesdays – their Top 20. These are the deals that they believe are the best ones for the week. It’s important to closely examine the deal AND book quickly. There will be certain trips that you can book at a better cost savings if you booked the parts individually. But it is hard to beat a six day trip to Prague, including airfare and hotel, for $500/person.

The second site is Scott’s Cheap Flights. Now, Scott sends newsletters highlighting heavily discounted international (exclusively) airfare, mistake fares, and the like. He offers two versions — the free one and the premium one, which costs $50/year. It has been worth it for us to pay for the premium version ($400 round trip airfare to Copenhagen? Sounds great!) but some might be fine with the free newsletter. Scott is a wiley entrepreneur though – recipients of the free newsletter often get emails about awesome fares they missed by not paying for the upgrade. This is the newsletter that started us down the path to Australia this summer. I mean, how in the world do you pass up $500 to Australia? For our clan, the answer is you don’t.

Maybe the title is a bit dramatic. I mean, it’s not as if I am known for overreacting to things…

This blog is about all the wonderful joys that can come from traveling with kids – watching the wonder in their eyes as they see something new for the first time, making memories that the whole family will look back on fondly for years to come, teaching your children to be strong, proud, caring world citizens. So it pains me just slightly to be writing this post as my second one. Normally, I would wait awhile before writing about one of our not so great trips but seeing as we JUST got back and it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I would be honest and talk about the times when things don’t go exactly as planned.

This past week was our first grader’s Spring Break and, as you will soon learn, Ron and I don’t do well when we have days off and nowhere to go. Of course a trip was in order and through the wonders of travel deals (which I will discuss soon) we were off to Quito, Ecuador. Now, I was in Quito about 12 years ago but this was Ron and the girls’ first time. We are not going to discuss how this means that Ron is now one country closer to evening out our country count. But I digress. We left Tuesday morning to spend 4 days in a city that I remembered with nothing but fondness.

Our trip down was perfectly fine, as were our first two days. It was the evening of our second full day in town when things started to go south. Ron has this thing for heights/views/anything that allows him to see the world from a different perspective. I personally don’t share this affinity but hey, I usually humor him and take a ride up an elevator, climb (some) stairs, or, in this case, crawl into a cable car for a ride up a mountain. We rode the TeleferiQo (see what they did there?!) up Pichincha Volcano and enjoyed some brief but stunning views of the entirety of Quito before being enveloped in a cloud that produced a pretty outstanding hail storm. With nothing to see but layers of white hail, back down the volcano we went. That’s when the trouble began.

Our oldest started throwing up that evening and remained sick for the remaining 2 days (plus 1 travel day) of our vacation. Altitude sickness. Seriously. How did Ron and I NOT consider the fact that being 10,000 feet above sea level in Quito, and then 15,000 feet up at the top of the volcano, would cause problems?

We didn’t even think about it. I guess that’s not entirely true – we brought our oxygen monitor for pete’s sake. But the possibility of actually getting altitude sickness didn’t even cross our minds. We say that we learn a lesson during every trip. The lesson learned here? There are things that you will just not even think about and it is so frustrating when those things you completely dismissed, forgot about, or didn’t even know about, cause stress. But it happens and while it sucks, it doesn’t mean that a vacation is lost. Traveling with kids can easily be salvaged. My favorite memory from this trip? The pure joy and laughter from the girls when Ron pretended to be scared when we went over the poles on the gondola ride down the volcano. My least favorite memory? My second child getting sick at the exact same time Luis (you’ll meet him in a minute) rescheduled a tour for us for the third time. Oops.

Second lesson learned: No mountains for our family for a very long time…

I would be totally remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Luis from the Casa Hotel Las Plazas. He was awesome in scheduling our tours and then subsequently cancelling our tours when the girls got sick, and then acting as our guide and translator when we finally took our oldest to the medical clinic. Amazing service and great hotel location – check it out.

One last soap box statement: Socialized medicine is awesome. We were in and out of the medical clinic, one of the cleanest I had been in, in less than 20 minutes. They  treated my daughter without even getting her name (side note, we went to a walk in clinic when we got home because she STILL wasn’t better. I had to fill out a number of forms, provide ID and insurance, AND give the place a credit card number to put on file before they would see her). The whole visit in Ecuador, including medicine, cost less than $35. Socialized medicine for the win, even for crazy Americans who don’t think anything of the altitude shift.

First confession: I know nothing about writing a blog. Second confession: Follow through is not my specialty – that’s my husband’s area of expertise. If you want something done, you ask Ron to do it. Or at least you ask him to put it on his to-do list. It will then either get done or he will hound someone else (usually me) just enough to make it happen. It’s an art form really. But this blog is something that I have wanted to start for a while now so I am jumping in and hoping that I can follow through with limited spousal nagging.

What do I want to talk about? I want to talk about all things travel related and more specifically, all things related to traveling with children. I have been traveling since I was a young child. My dad, my travel hero, has been around the world multiple times. He somehow convinced my mother, who had never gone beyond Mexico (and that was likely only because she grew up in New Mexico and Arizona) to quit their jobs and spend three months traveling around the world. Maybe there will be a post on their travel experiences as they have some fascinatingly interesting stories. Anyway, my parents knew the importance of travel and brought us along on their various trips. We weren’t a Disney World family (I didn’t make it to Epcot until I was in my late 30s and even then, I was only there for a conference) and you wouldn’t find us at the beach. But we had our own adventures and made memories that even now, twenty and thirty years later, we still have us cracking up.

One of the many things that attracted me to my husband was the fact that he loved to travel just as much as I did. In fact, when we first got together, we had been to the exact same number of countries. Not that anyone is keeping track, but I am currently ahead by three countries. But I digress… When we had children, there wasn’t a big discussion about whether or not we would travel. It was part of our identity and we just assumed we would take our children with. For better or worse…

Our two girls have had their passports since they were each six months old and took their first international trips well before their first birthdays. Have we learned a lot of lessons along the way? Of course. Have there been lessons we should have learned by now but haven’t (snack bag, I’m looking at you)? Um, yes. Freakouts? Obviously. Amazing family experiences? Most definitely.

We aren’t experts in traveling with kids but we are definitely experienced. And that’s what this blog is about. Hopefully we can impart some of the things we’ve learned and convince other families that traveling, even with young children, doesn’t have to be a daunting experience.