Maternity/paternity leave is an excellent time to travel. Not needing to coordinate with others or timetables for holiday booking can give you the opportunity to take holidays when you previously wouldn’t have been able to. This is especially true for anyone who works in education who would have previously been restricted to travelling during school holidays.
When little person was born we had already planned a trip to New Zealand with a stopover in Thailand on the way back. This flight was going to involve 23 hours in the air. Less than a month later we had also booked a trip to Barbados. This flight was going to be about 8 hours direct from London. Both trips were going to be before Little Person was 6 months old. Considering this I thought it would be a good idea to acclimatise Little Person to air travel. So booked a short city break to Alicante for when Little Person was 2 months old. This had a lot of advantages:
- We could figure out all the things we needed to have to fly with a baby, whilst not having to panic if we forgot anything.
- We were able to gauge how Little Person reacted to the changes in pressure during takeoff and landing.
- We were able to figure out how easy it was to navigate airports and airplanes with all of our normal luggage as well as a baby.
- We could test out Little Person staying in a new location and what we would need to bring from home to help her with this.
- We could get out into the sunshine, which was much needed considering Little Person was born at the end of Autumn when the UK experiences very little sunshine.
Alicante was a good destination to have this trip for us because we could get there directly from Bristol. This meant no long drive to the airport. Alicante also has good transport links to the airport, simplifying getting around.
The trip ended up being a success, even though the trip home from the airport afterwards involved a great deal of crying. It gave us the confidence for the trips which were coming up that we were going to be able to do this. If we had gone straight to the trip to New Zealand I am confident we would have been overwhelmed with trying to get to grips with everything new that travelling with a baby involves.
I really think scaling up is a good way to approach introducing children to travel as long as that is an option for you. Hopefully by easing them into it, your child will begin to enjoy travelling as much as you do, I know ours has.
