Top Tips for Travel With Kids
Want to travel with kids but feel a bit apprehensive about it? Here’s some tips for traveling with kids from parents.
As you know, we have been traveling around the world since 2008 with our young daughter Hanalei, who is now five years old. She was only 1.5 years old when we began our Endless Summer Journey! So I thought I would share with you my top 5 tips for traveling around the world with kids, including tips for traveling with kids on airplanes and tips for traveling with kids in the car.
My top tips:
1. Kids are completely adaptable
Don’t underestimate your kids. We crossed the border from Costa Rica to Nicaragua with our daughter when she was only 2 years old!
2. Get them a huge cuddly teddy bear!
If you’re looking for tips on how to travel by plane with an infant or even how to do a kids trip by train, I suggest getting them a huge cuddly teddy bear. The big cuddly teddy bear can be used for a multitude of situations. Kids like something firm to sleep on whilst traveling. The teddy bear can become a booster seat, their protection and their bed inside of an aeroplane.
3. School
Hanalei started going to different cultured schools when she was about 2 years old, and her first school was in Bali Indonesia. It might sound crazy, but putting kids into the environment of learning a language is the best thing you can do for them, and they are very adaptable. What we do is arrive into a country and start communicating with other ex-pats around us. We talk to other people that have children, and ask about their schooling. Hanalei learned Bahasa in Indonesia, and Portuguese when we were in Brazil. Although she already had a foundation in Spanish, we were a little worried that she would find it difficult to learn Portuguese, but since the languages are quite similar, she had no problem picking it up.
4. Finding a Home
When we first arrive, we usually stay in a good hotel in the area that we want to live in for 2-3 days. Then we start searching for the right house. We typically use vrbo.com or airbnb.com and message the owners about a month in advance asking them whether their house would be suitable for a child. When we get to the country, we start searching for the right home.
If you all counted…I only gave you 4 tips!! The boat that pulled up started to honk its horn so I cut if off short…
Tip 5 is teach them your phone number that you get locally or have them wear a bracelet with your local phone number on it.
We use Iphones that are unlocked, and every country we enter into we purchase a SIM card with a local phone number for both Brian and I. Once we get that number we put it on a bracelet that Hanalei wears and knows where the number is in case anything ever happens to her.
Once she gets older we will start teaching her the local number, but for young kids having them wear it is best.
We have actually wrote our numbers on her hand while in Disney because we didn’t have a bracelet…it may look weird but it works. (be sure to use a black Sharpie pen)