Bon Voyage – avec les petits
By: Jenn Director Knudsen
Traveling far afield with your children strengthens family bonds, reminds parents of what’s most important and tests your creativity.
We went to Paris and skipped the Louvre. We stayed in a home a mere hour’s drive from France’s Champagne region…but tasting would have bored the kids, so we bypassed the bubbly. In Germany we had gelato. In London we pushed a cart through Platform 9 ¾, but did little else. And chocolate never was taboo; we ate it from the tip of northern France to polyglot Brussels to a medieval town on the Germany-France border.
“We” is my husband and me and our two daughters, Alyssa, 8, and Hayley, 6.
Last August, we swapped our Southwest Portland home for a quaint (and I mean ‘quaint’; I’m not employing cliché here) farmhouse constructed entirely of brick in a small community of 2400 reticent French folks in the country’s northernmost region.
We exchanged homes via HomeLink.com with the Millescamps family from the village of Avelin. This was the French family’s first U.S. trip, and Gilles, Florence, Hugo, 7, and Inès, 3, spent it in our home, with our neighbors and our two cats as companions. (By the end of the Millescamps’ month here, the family had begun affectionately referring – in their heavily accented English – to our felines as “zee dawm cats.”)
My husband, David, and I previously had taken our girls to Hawaii, Seattle, San Diego, Disneyland, the Oregon Coast, Central Oregon and Santa Fe, New Mexico, a scorching hot locale I’d counsel other families to avoid taking young’uns to.
So jetting off to Europe indeed was to be a huge departure for us. But, with David staring down a gracious 10-week sabbatical, we decided to take a big risk and spend one month of that break from his job somewhere very far away.
Where the language is not English. Where tortillas are hard to come by and croissants are ubiquitous. Where public toilets seriously suck. And where our children would get a fantastic introduction to foreign travel and a lot (possibly too much) of close-knit family time.
By the end of our French life, Alyssa, who soon was to enter second grade, said, “When I grow up, I hope to travel the world!” and “I really, really, really miss my friends!” Mission accomplished.
To our great amazement, the home (and car) swap worked out even better than we’d expected. By the time we left France at August’s end, we’d had the chance to meet the Millescamps and became good friends with the family. We also gained an appreciation for the Millescamps’ very zippy diesel car and American efficiency that the French totally lack.
But of course the temporary move to another hemisphere wasn’t all roses and perfection.
Dave and I did make some great decisions (eat lunches out; eat dinners in; say “oui” [or “yes” in any language] to chocolate or ice cream more often than at home). And we made some stinkers (such as taking our children to Versailles on a blistering hot day during the height of Europeans’ vacation season).
We – and other parents who’ve traveled abroad with young children – have learned a lot in the name of logistics, much of it while on the go.
Kids will be kids
“This is not a forced march,” counsels Dick Simon, a Newton, Mass., father of three who’s taken his family to all corners of Central and South America, Africa and beyond, starting when his youngest, now 16, was just 5. “Just because you are traveling, don’t forget that these are kids – they get tired, hungry.”
Simon said that he and his wife, Patty, made – and always stuck to – their original decision never to say to one another, “If the kids weren’t here, we would do X.” By contrast, he said, he and his wife would do what the children loved. “It’s really a family trip, rather than the parents taking the kids. There is no checklist.”
Northeast Portlanders Kate Lieber and her partner, Monique Matheson, intelligently planned last year’s three-week trip to Italy with their children, then ages 7 and 5, with “built-in down time,” Lieber said. After beginning their journey in Rome and doing lots of walking and sightseeing, the family rented a villa in Tuscany – with a pool.
Find a pool
While I happily could have sat in a car from dawn ’till dusk, gaping at the French countryside, children simply cannot stand being so sedentary. David and I often knew when our girls’ sedentary limit had arrived; they’d start picking at each other and their fuses blew more rapidly. Exercising them always worked as the antidote to their squirrelies. But in our family, saying, “Let’s go for a brisk walk, jog or bike ride” often smacks too much of adults cajoling kids away from the screen and into an activity.
But there’s something about the phrase, “Let’s go swimming!” It sounds like too much fun to pass up. And it worked every time.
We’d found an impressively large, municipal swimming pool in a small town about a 20-minute drive from our village. It boasts a long, green hydrotube and a wave machine that would be activated at scheduled times during open swim. The only Americans for seemingly miles around, we soon became well-known at this club nautique, which had dank locker rooms that lacked any privacy between the men’s and women’s sides and exercised what seemed to us the most ludicrous law in all of France.
It is literally against the law for men or boys to wear swim shorts; they’re considered dirty in France, the source of endless scum that dissolves its way into the country’s swimming pools, polluting them and the people frolicking in them. Long story short: David finally gained entry into the pool on our first of many visits after he agreed to borrow (yes, borrow) some other man’s faded blue Speedo-style suit. (For more on this episode, visit our blog at francofamille.wordpress.com under the heading “hamac de banane.”)
Perhaps more amusing than watching David attempt to get comfortable in public wearing arguably less than he dons in the shower, was witnessing the girls’ reaction. They could have cared less: They just wanted their parents to stop delaying so they at last could cannonball into the pool and play ’till their skin resembled raisins.
As Lieber recounted from her family’s Tuscan experience, “We would go visit some small village in the morning and swim all afternoon. It was great for the kids.” (And, I’m sure, their moms, too.)
But Europe has such great museums…
Skip ‘em! Or, at least, be reasonable about how much of them the kids will enjoy, and hit the exit when it’s time. Same goes for activities like architectural tours, following in the path of some famous artist or even a boat tour that you know deep down will trundle on beyond your kids’ capacity to appreciate the ride.
“We do markets, but very little sightseeing,” Simon said. “We did the Louvre in 15 minutes versus the two-plus hours [spent] in the fountain out front, [plus] more in a pond with mini-sailboats.”
The closest big city to our village was Lille, one of France’s largest metropolises and a university town with beautiful sculptures, impressive fountains, a vibrant amusement park and a creative public park that spanned an entire city block. We took a couple furtive drive-by photos of a sculpture or two and a fountain or two, but we spent entire afternoons on the amusement park’s rides and the park’s play structures.
At Giverny, the town west of Paris made famous by Claude Monet taking up residence there beginning in the 1880s, the Impressionist painter’s garden remains lovingly and expertly tended, as does his house. Alyssa and Hayley marveled at the gardens’ sumptuous flora but, predictably, raced through Monet’s equally sumptuous and brightly painted home. Admitting defeat, I bought a postcard of his colossal blue-and-white oven, since the two seconds I had to eye it before Hayley dragged me back to the outdoors didn’t satisfy my yen to spend a while gaping at it.
Never underestimate your kids
While I – and others who’ve traveled far afield with their children – counsel avoiding places like museums, kids also can surprise you with their adaptability, stamina and creativity.
“Never underestimate your kids,” Lieber said. “Our 5-year-old would do almost anything for a gelato at the end of the day. In Florence, we climbed the steps of the Duomo all the way to the top, and he led the way!” she recalled, adding, “At the end, of course, we all had a huge ice cream.”
In France, Alyssa had me write key phrases in French on scrap paper so she could offer a rudimentary introduction of herself to kids on the playground. That way, she successfully engaged in play with young children who spoke no English. Hayley, on the other hand, when she screwed up the courage, would simply begin playing on the same equipment as other children. Kids love to play; more often than not, our daughters would run, jump and spin alongside other kids yammering at them in a tongue they couldn’t decipher. (Maybe one day my girls, like me, will desire to learn French. But they really had no need while there.)
The Simon children, by contrast, have traveled to countries (45 total) where the languages spoken often are not taught in American schools. They improvised and still made friends – with children with whom they shared no common words.
“Our kids have been beaten – no, decimated – in soccer by barefoot kids all over the world,” Simon laughed.
Reaping risks’ rewards
Simon, whose children started becoming world travelers 11 years ago, recognizes he’s now in an enviable position: He has a clear picture of how his kids ultimately benefited in ways once unforeseen by the family’s wanderlust.
“We have been back to Guatemala over 15 times since our first trip and become very involved with micro credit and a range of other nonprofits,” he said.
More than 10 years later, Simon said, he knows just how fast that time went. “And I am so grateful that we grabbed every moment we could with our kids.”
In fact, that child, Alex Simon, who started traveling at age 9, today is a senior at George Washington University, where he’s majoring in international affairs, and has created a couple of nonprofits – including Students for Sustainability (students4sustainability.org) and Youth Microcredit International (ymci.org) – inspired by his experiences abroad.
Alex’s younger sister, Katie Simon, 18, is a high school senior and created Minga: Teens fighting the global sex trade of children (mingagroup.org). Katie conceived of her nonprofit after her experiences in poverty-stricken countries, starting at age 7.
“It’s all from the early exposure of getting a sense of the big world out there,” their father, Dick Simon, said. “We always told our kids they were international ambassadors.”
We, too, reminded our girls about the importance of offering Europeans a good impression of Americans. But our style of travel differed from that of the Matheson-Lieber and Simon families.
It never hurt the Knudsen girls to have a square or two of seriously rich, dark Belgian chocolate awaiting their return to their French home.
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With a master’s in journalism from UC Berkeley, Jenn Director Knudsen of Southwest Portland is a decade into freelance reporting, focusing largely on local human-interest features, religion, health and issues of importance to parents. She loves cooking, jogging and reading, often doing two of those three activities with her two young daughters underfoot.
