Why? Whhy? Whhhhy?

After a day of traveling

Traveling with children is not for the faint of heart. It involves planning, schlepping, whining, sweating, sleep deprivation, yelling and an unrelenting outflow of money. Yet, we love it and keep going back for more.

Why????????

Are we sadists? Maybe. But, I think it is more likely that we are optimists and cultivators of selective memory.

Here’s how it goes for our family….

Pooped

We get a notion for a trip and I start planning. We have a couple of tiffs as we chose transportation, hotels, and activities. I feel resentful that I have to be our family trip planner…oh woe is me (ok, I understand that this is not a sympathetic position!!). Soon we find ourselves venturing to REI to buy a picnic knife and compact first aid kit. We get excited for our adventure and embrace the fantasy that our experience will mirror the sunny faces we see on Facebook and in travel magazines.

Exploded yogurt

And then we launch. The journey to our destination usually involves overpriced, crappy food, a spilled beverages, an argument either with each other or an airline about who is sitting where, and fairly regularly some vomit. Soon we are in our destination. We are tired, we are hungry and we are discombobulated.

The drama of locomotion quickly ends and settle into our trip. There are highs and lows. We enjoy flaky croissants for breakfast and beautiful afternoons on soft sand beaches but more often than not sweaty, grumpy hours plodding through “important” historical sites. Fairly regularly I fantasize about abandoning my children. Every traveling family I have ever spoken to experiences the lows. Even when it is great, it is hard.

So why do we keep doing it? For two reasons:

First, we do it because even though there are hard parts, there are even more awesome ones. Swimming with schools of fish, the vista from a turret, seeing something up-close you have only seen in books, realizing your child loves calamari, enjoying a sunset cocktail with your hubby while your kids watch Sponge Bob  in a hotel room….

Muddy fun

Equally important however, is that my memory of our travel experiences is totally selective. In my memory a tantrum becomes a humorous story, the lost child an anecdote of new found independence, the emergency room visit an opportunity for cultural reflection and of course vomiting on your sibling is always funny in the retelling. I forget the pain and look back happily on the family memories we have created.

Giggles in Valencia

We are not the only suffers of this selective memory. When our friends tell of their grand adventures it is a pollyanna version. We could be liars but I think that we honestly all forget the cruddy parts and focus on the best ones. Our photos probably help since we take pictures of the best parts and rarely pull out our cameras when our child is proving a urine sample in a remote emergency room.

Just floating around

David Hockney recently said, “Happiness seems to be a retrospective pleasure.” This is especially true about traveling with children. In the moment every trip has its highs and lows but as time passes and the edges of our recollection are softened an adventure is refined and distilled into something purely wonderful.

And when we get to the point of wonderful we start the cycle all over again.