DIY Travel Advice

After reading My Little Nomads, I stumbled on another site about traveling with children. Then another and another and - who knew there was a travel-mommy blogging subgenre? How could I have missed that when I was painstakingly researching our disastrous Japan trip last year? At the time, I thought I was entering, if not unexplored, then at least uncharted, territory. Before that disastrous Japan trip, travel-mommy blogging would have sounded like a dream job. Actually, it still does. Imagine being able to travel with your small children and write about it. I am wildly jealous of families who make travel work.

I really want to know more about how they do it. First, how do they log (and pay for) enough travel time to keep a blog active? I can see how a young singleton could spend three months on the road, then throw in a couple long weekends and philosophical musings. But who can spend three months on the road with kids? Three weeks almost killed me. Closer inspection revealed that some sites, like Ciao Bambino, are curated collections. The year-old site My Little Nomads accepts reader submissions and mines nearly a decade of past trips for material.

And then there’s WanderMom. This woman is documenting a year-long, round-the-world trip with her two kids. She even has a sponsors page! I’m dying to know if sponsorship is limited to gear or if it actually subsidizes her trip. If I could get paid to travel (or even get travel paid for) I don’t think I would care if it was hell to bring my kids.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a blog with much practical advice about how to take the hell out of “Hello, World, here we come.” Many posts talked about how to keep kids occupied on the plane. Only one addressed what to do when you use up all your tricks while your delayed plane sits two hours on the runway. I saw one post about dealing with illness on a trip. It suggested taking a day to rest. It didn’t address what to do when your toddler has been running a fever for a week and you haven’t left your hostel in six days. Nor what to do when your same toddler has a different raging fever and your flight home leaves tomorrow but you’ve been on hold over an hour and can’t talk to a live person about changing your flight. (Answer: airport security will let you carry on a bottle of Children’s Tylenol exceeding 3oz when your miserable toddler hangs like a sack of sweaty potatoes on your shoulder as you go through security.)

I love to travel. I miss traveling. I miss enjoying traveling. I want someone to tell me how to make it work. But I guess I’ll just have to do it myself.