The irony of this post title is the sentiment is true: if you are taking your toddler on vacation, it is indeed not a vacation. We took our first family vacation as a family of three to Massachusetts last fall. At the time, Emerson was a little over one year old and, lucky for us, hadn’t fully started walking. Even though it wasn’t a sit-back-and-relax kind of trip (looking back now, I didn’t know what exhaustion from a toddler was!), we had the best time but also learned a lot about traveling with a little in tow.
Our flight from Baltimore to Boston was early in the morning, which worked great for us! Emerson is usually her best in the morning, even with an early wake-up call. We had kept her in her pajamas hoping she’d fall back asleep during the hour drive to the airport, but we were all too excited. We had a bottle of milk waiting for her and that kept her happy.
We had purchased a new stroller that was better for travel and I can honestly say it was a total game changer. Not only was it inexpensive in comparison to other travel strollers on the market, but it was so easy to use. It also comes with a cup holder and phone holder, but beware, we lost the cup holder on the flight home. We used it all through the airport and checked it at the gate. An absolute must!
We spent the first few days of our trip on Cape Cod. We stayed in a cute little Airbnb in Cotuit, a small village relatively central to the places we wanted to see. The rental was also baby-friendly and had a bunch of amenities, including a pack-n-play and highchair. It was one less thing for us to pack, and easy to set up!
The second half of our trip was spent in Boston. We decided not to keep the rental car while in Boston since we could utilize the shuttle provided by our hotel to get to the “T” (Boston’s version of the subway), which was a cheaper method of transportation, but a little more inconvenient and less out of our control. More on that in the lessons below.
For our trip to Massachusetts being our first true vacation just the three of us, I’d consider it a wild success. We went in with low expectations, not knowing how well she’d do, especially with flying (she was great :) ) but did learn a few things that will help us plan trips in the future. Here are the biggest lessons learned:
- Plan and prep for naps: Bless our sweet girl but she has a serious case of FOMO and did not want to miss a moment! We were hoping she’d nap on the go but she fought her naps with everything she had. Naps worked a little better when we were on the Cape because there was typically travel time in the car each day, where she was able to take a few cat naps. We took a day trip to Nantucket and booked the ferry trip in the morning before her nap time, but ended up watching the ferry sail away without us. We were able to transfer our tickets to the next ferry, which put us boarding right at naptime. Poor Emerson was not a happy camper, and I still feel bad for the mom of three sitting next to us with an infant trying to sleep! In Boston, she fought them most of the day, giving in about 45 minutes before dinner, allowing Jody and I to play the ‘Should she sleep or eat?’ game.
- Make dinner reservations early: Dinner wasn’t necessarily an issue on the Cape but the wait times in Boston taught us this lesson on the first night. We decided to eat in Little Italy and all of the restaurants were packed (granted, it was a Saturday night of a holiday weekend). We found a place that had an hour-long wait and decided to chance it. By the time we were seated, it was past Emerson’s bedtime and we still had a 40-minute subway ride back to the hotel. We ended up ordering our food to go and eating lasagna on the bed in our hotel room after we put Emerson to sleep. We ensured we had reservations much earlier for the last two nights of our trip, which allowed us to actually enjoy our meal!
- Stay local to where you plan to spend most of your time: As I mentioned above, we opted for the less expensive travel and room accommodations once we got to Boston. Our hotel was right next to the airport, which was convenient for our early flight home, but was across the river from downtown. Since it took nearly 40 minutes by subway into the city, it wasn’t conducive to go back and forth several times throughout the day. This created the situation of needing Emerson to nap on the go in her stroller, where instead it would have been so much easier for everyone if we had stayed near the historical district where we spent the majority of our time and popped back to the hotel room for a quick nap. Lesson most definitely learned!
We are headed on vacation this weekend, one of our last as a family of three! Emerson is just a few weeks shy of turning two and I’m sure there will be more lessons to learn on this trip. However, now that we have these lessons under our belt, I’m optimistic a few things will go a bit smoother.
