While casually browsing the internet late one night, I found an amazing deal on a flight to Denver. After a brief discussion with my wife, I promptly purchased four tickets (one for each family member.) “We’re going on a ski trip!” I yelled —my wife told me to be quiet or I would wake up the kids. After sharing our plans with friends and family, we quickly realized that everyone thought we were more than a little nuts for planning a such a trip with twin three-year-olds. But I didn’t get nervous until a few days before we left, when I briefly considered that we may be getting in over our heads. The trip…was amazing and I am so glad we decided to go but that’s not to say there weren’t a few bumps along the way. The flight (and getting to/from the airport) was the most difficult part of the entire trip. Here are a few things we would do differently the next time:
Plan on getting to the airport 3 hours early.
It may same extreme, but traveling with kids takes a lot of extra time and you really do need an extra hour. In our case, we ended up getting stuck in traffic and had to rush through the airport to barely make our flight. Had we just left an hour earlier, all of the stress involved could easily have been avoided.
Consolidate luggage, but remember to weigh your bags.
Ideally, you only want one large suitcase per adult, but that gets pretty hard to do when travelling with sports equipment and even more difficult when travelling with kids and sports equipment. I put all four of our skis in one large ski case, but ended up being two pounds overweight and had to pay an overweight bag fee. I avoided the fee on the way home by managing to fit one of our kid’s ski in our regular suitcase.
Leave the car seats in the car.
My wife was pretty insistent that we take our own car seats along on the plane and I reluctantly agreed. Big mistake! The worst thing about the entire trip was lugging those GD things around. I ended up strapping both of the car seats to the same luggage cart because I didn’t have enough hands to carry everything. But then I had to unstrap everything to fit it through the TSA scanner! Trying to get them to fit down the narrow airplane aisle was no fun, either was buckling them into the airplane seats while all the other passengers were trying to board. The car rental companies charge an arm-and-a-leg for toddler car seats, but this is one time when I think it’s better to just pay the money.
Bring the tablets.
I have a love/hate relationship with kid’s tablets. On one hand, we’re traveling halfway across to country to get our kids outside and enjoy nature. But on the other hand, nearly 8 hours of traveling is a lot to expect a toddler to tolerate without some kind of distraction. We just let our kids know that this is a special circumstance and that they won’t always be able to watch their tablets this much in one day. Don’t forget to download shows/games to their device before you leave.
Fly out of the closest airport.
The cheap flight is what initially got me started in planning the trip. In retrospect, it would have been quite a bit easier to fly out of a closer/smaller airport. Next time we’ll spend a little more money on the closer flight, but that’s after gaining a little confidence that family trips with toddlers can in-fact be an enjoyable experience!
