Travelling With A Toddler: A Few Learnings

I know, several parents have already chronicled their travel experiences with kid/s here but I would still go ahead and offer my two pence on travelling with a toddler [mine is 2 years and 3 months old].

I am just back from an 8 day trip to Rajasthan. Barring the flights we took for reaching and leaving from Jaipur, rest all travelling involved road trips of long hours. We traveled to Jaipur-Pushkar-Ajmer-Jodhpur-Jaisalmer by road – one of the road trips lasting for as many as 10 hours! Had it been just the two of us, it would not have been as maddening as it eventually turned out to be. But sigh! You do and you learn. Not that I had not read hundreds of articles about travelling with toddlers but nothing can truly prepare you for the actual experience [much like having a baby].

Here are my learnings from this amazing trip on travelling with a toddler, which included air and road travel:

• Take the flight at the time when your child usually naps because it is difficult to keep a toddler tied to a spot for long. We were lucky to have both our flights around D’s afternoon nap time. He blissfully slept during most of the first flight and all of the second one.
• Kids get agitated during flights [especially the take offs and the landings] due to the discomfort in their ears. D had a bad experience, owing to his naive parents, the last time we took a flight [D was all of 10 months then]. This time daddy had the foresight to play a little game with D in which both of them had to put cotton in their ears. And this was done while we were still hanging around the airport. Since D loves dry fruits, especially cashew nuts and raisins, we were loaded with those. The moment our plane took off; I kept talking inanities to him and also fed him continuously. Our both flights went super-smooth on that front.
• Screen time can be a boon during road trips and even during flights. We were not carrying our laptops or tablet, and I was cursing myself for that. The idea was to keep ourselves off those gadgets during the vacation, but for our otherwise screen free toddler, it would have been a nice deviation and enticing enough to keep him glued. We even contemplated buying a cheap tablet but then good sense prevailed.
• Carry some new board books or games or activity sets. For example, during one of the road trips, we took a bunch of colourful strings and started putting the die cut ABCDs through them, making up some game out of it and this really kept him occupied for quite some time. His old board books and toys were royally ignored for much of the time.
• On road trips, take breaks after every 2 hours at least. Toddlers have a lot of energy which needs to be released. So every time we would stop for food or snacks, we would choose a spacious place, and make him run around for a while.
• I did not fuss about either food or TV time or any such rules of the household. I let him eat or not eat as per his mood. I really love the buffet breakfasts. They offer so many options that something or the other certainly clicks. In the car, we had stocked up a lot of fruits and dry fruits.
• Resist making the most of each day. Limit your sightseeing to half a day. This was our biggest mistake. D naps during afternoons. And when he has to sleep, he would not just sleep; he would become hyperactive in delirium till the time one of us would soothe him and put him to sleep. We realized how hard it was on him around after lunch to go on. So, sometimes we skipped a few things in our itinerary because the more important thing was that each one of us enjoys the trip rather than rush around.

Everything said and done, there were good days and bad days with a toddler in tow during the trip. And we came back wiser about travelling with a toddler. We already know a lot of things but tend to overlook. It was our first major trip with our little one and since we plan to take many more in the times to come, the learnings are certainly going to make the next vacation a better success.

So, tell me, have I missed anything important that comes to your mind?