The Case for Taking Youngsters on Massive Journeys—Even These That Sound Like a Horrible Concept

I have a long track record of making ill-advised—occasionally unhinged—family-travel decisions. My son Julian’s first interstate trip was to Wisconsin to go ice fishing at five weeks old. At 20 months, I took him—just the two of us—on a 23-day trip through Oman, Tanzania, and the United Arab Emirates to road trip across the Wahiba Sands and Hajar Mountains before flying off on safari.

Friends thought I’d lost it. My husband wished me luck and stayed home. A year later, Julian and I left for 88 days and 14 countries across six continents. Our stint in India, which set off alarm bells with family, was one of my favorite stops: In the glorious sensory overload of Varanasi and Delhi, Julian’s loudness barely registered; I could finally exhale. I waited a long time to have a child because I wasn’t sure I wanted one—or was particularly cut out to be somebody’s mom.

Parenthood has changed how I assess risk, but fear has never gotten much of a vote in my life, and I don’t want it calling the shots in his either. Sometimes the whole thing blows up in your face. But I’ve learned not to confuse a hard trip with a bad one. When Julian was three, I took him to the Indy 500. Thanks to my job in media, we had a police escort, VIP suite, and pit access.

I packed enough snacks to provision a bunker;

I packed enough snacks to provision a bunker; what I did not pack was a change of clothes. Shortly before the race started, Julian had a diaper breach of biblical proportions: diarrhea up his back, down his legs, and soaking through his shirt, socks, and pants. I spent half an hour cleaning him while my husband scoured the merch stands for children’s pants. Nothing. Our salvation was an $80, size XL Indianapolis Motor Speedway Christmas sweater.

We rolled the sleeves five times, cinched the excess fabric behind his neck with a hair tie, and returned our pantsless son to the grandstands in what was, functionally, a holiday sweater dress. By then the race was underway. When I hoisted Julian up to see the cars screaming past, his face broke into an enormous grin. Poopgate 2025 became family lore: the time our three-year-old redefined “blowout at the Indy 500.”
The moments that make you want to crawl into a hole while they’re happening have a way of improving with age.

Someday that sweater will fit him, and I look forward to explaining its provenance to any future partner he brings home. Taking a preschooler to Mardi Gras sounded reckless for different reasons: heaving crowds, heavy drinking, Bourbon Street bedlam. But having done it, I’d argue that most of Mardi Gras is family-friendly; the late-night debauchery is past our bedtime anyway. We watched the parades from elevated stands at the Sheraton New Orleans, a setup that offered us a prime perch and Club Lounge access with bathrooms and snacks.

The greatest danger, it turned out, was not

The greatest danger, it turned out, was not the beer-fueled mayhem so many pearl-clutchers warned us about; it was getting pelted in the face with beads. To Julian, every float was a toy store on wheels, with krewe members hurling footballs, stuffed animals, and light-up swords. He quickly mastered the reach-and-duck: one arm begging for loot, the other shielding his head. Outside Toulouse Theatre in the French Quarter, rainbow confetti swirled through the air as the street dissolved into one giant Fat Tuesday dance party.

Julian was the only kid there. He threw himself into the costumed revelry, cutting a rug with strangers who draped beads around his neck. Nobody cared that we had brought a four-year-old. They loved that he was having as much fun as they were. So much parental anxiety is anticipatory: a knee-jerk “no” that imagines all the worst-case-scenario reasons a place won’t work for a child before giving the place—or the child—a chance to prove us wrong.

Alaska in winter put that theory through the wringer. For Julian’s first spring break, I chose what is arguably the least spring break-y destination imaginable, timed to the 54th annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race’s ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage. We stayed at The Wildbirch Hotel overlooking the route, with a front-row spot outside and an escape hatch upstairs when the inevitable cold-hungry-bored trifecta hit.

We were also there for Fur Rondy, Anchorage’s

We were also there for Fur Rondy, Anchorage’s beloved winter festival. Julian rode snow-covered midway rides and watched Alaskans in inflatable dinosaur suits race alongside actual reindeer in the annual Running of the Reindeer. It was all going so well, I got smug. Check us out! My hardy Minnesota kid is taking Alaska in winter like a champ. Then we flew to Fairbanks. Temperatures plunged to -38°F.

Julian got a nasty cough and spent a full day zombied out with his iPad. When he finally felt better, we ventured out to the World Ice Art Championships, but spent almost as much time thawing out in the warming tent as we did whooshing down ice slides. By the time we checked into Sheep Mountain Lodge, a historic collection of cabins in the Mat-Su Valley, we were sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Then Alaska reminded me why I’d dragged us there in the first place. Some operators won’t take a four-year-old kid on a snow machine, but folks up north are more adventurous. We bundled Julian like a taquito, tucked him in behind me, and stuck to short loops on a frozen lake. Within minutes, he was yelling, “Faster, Mama!”
Later that day, lodge owner and helicopter pilot Mark Fleenor flew us over the Matanuska Glacier.

We spotted Dall sheep and moose before touching

We spotted Dall sheep and moose before touching down near an ice cave, where Julian looked tiny in a cathedral of electric-blue ice. He picked up a hunk and asked if he could bring it home. “Sure!” Fleenor said, helping him load it into the helicopter. And just like that, my kid was flying home from a glacier with his own personal iceberg. Alaska got one last laugh when a blizzard stranded us in Anchorage for an extra 48 hours.

Didn’t matter. I would’ve suffered another month of airport misery for that day alone. A tantrum abroad is no different than one at home. A sick day is still a sick day. Plans implode. Parents screw up. Kids lose their shit. None of those things automatically means the trip was a mistake. Earlier this month, Stanley Safaris helped me orchestrate another mother-son trip that sounded ludicrous when detailed aloud: two and a half weeks across South Africa and Madagascar, including brutal overnight routings through the Netherlands and Ethiopia.

This time, though, I could see what four-plus years of repeatedly saying “yes” had added up to. At Tswalu Loapi in the Kalahari, Julian joined game drives in search of cheetahs and rhinos, and spent a day at the staff-village school. At Time + Tide Tsara Komba off Madagascar’s northwest coast, we hiked through Lokobe National Park. Julian tore ahead, enchanted by glossy black lemurs, poison dart frogs, fist-size insects, and a Malagasy boa curled on the forest floor like a firehose.

He didn’t hesitate. He was game for all

He didn’t hesitate. He was game for all of it. Watching him disappear deeper into that jungle, I could see the kid I’d hoped all those allegedly terrible ideas might help me raise. I’m not suggesting every parent take a preschooler to New Orleans during Mardi Gras or Fairbanks in -38°F weather. Find your own edge. Stick a toe over it. Book the trip you keep dismissing as “too hard.” Maybe it will be a complete disaster and you’ll swear never again, or maybe you’ll get your own ice-cave moment, and every aggravation will feel worth it.

Post-travel amnesia has a funny way of preserving the good parts and turning the worst ones into stories you’ll eventually laugh about. I want Julian to grow up knowing that difficult doesn’t mean impossible, that a bad day doesn’t mean a bad trip, and that not every experience has to be great to be worth having. I’d rather we collect a few spectacular failures than spend our lives wondering what we missed.

Source: www.cntraveler.com