Travel Travails with Toddlers

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“Let us know how it goes,” our friends smirked before we departed with our three year old twins on a two week foray into France and Switzerland. Steve and I loved adventure traveling together in our pre-kid days. We’d sling backpacks on our backs and spontaneously discover hostels and street food vendors in the back-alleys of Thailand, Turkey and Morocco. We knew this would be…well…different.


So, armed with two single umbrella strollers, clipped together to carry kids and bags through airports and train stations, we lugged our entourage to the gate at Iceland Air. Laying over in Reykjavik saved us over $1000 in airfare. But, when a delay in New York caused us to miss our Iceland flight to Paris, we spent six hours in a smoky Icelandic hotel, sleeping off the grumpies.

Finally, Paris. Aaaaah. With three-year-olds. Ooooh. With a lovely little one bedroom apartment as a base, we practiced ADD tourism, visiting as many sights as possible, and then racing ‘home’ on the subway for a nap. Usually, we missed the window, and wound up with one or both children losing themselves to a Metro Meltdown. This was particularly painful because the unspoken rule of the Paris Metro is just that: silence. Imagine a shrieking howler monkey in an echo chamber and you’re right there with us.

There was, of course, plenty of glory. Eating a seven dollar ice cream cone after descending the Eiffel Tower – worth every penny. Visiting the Louvre on ‘Free Day” and going right to the front of the line because of the strollers. (We even considered, for future visits, pushing each other in a wheelchair, for ease of access.) Strolling the picturesque Luxemburg Gardens, and eating a sinfully delicious chocolate croissant.

Our train ride to Lausanne, Switzerland led us to Lake Geneva’s swan-spotted waters, in the foothills of the Alps. We found the high speed train fast and comfortable. Small ‘lap’ children travel free, to boot. Our kids napped in the “tents” formed between the back and forward facing seats.
Our mini portable car seats in the rental car worked moderately well. They would have worked better if we hadn’t forgotten to bring the locking clips. So, Steve devised a spider web like contraption that welded the seatbelts together securely.

Swiss road signs, incidentally, all look like an octopus doing the Macarena. We stopped to ask for directions, only to receive the same response – loosely translated as, “Straight. Straight. You go straight ahead. You can’t miss it, stupid Americans.” Two hours later, we were in Italy.

The room in the Swiss guest house had a bathroom the size of a small village, so we bedded the kids down in there for some ‘parental privacy’. (This was considerably better than the New York hotel room on our return layover, where Steve and I hungrily devoured Chinese food out of a Styrofoam container while sitting in the bathroom so that the kids could fall asleep in the tiny room.) At the guest house, the catch was, until the kids were soundly asleep, we had to use the hall bathroom. Steve assured me he was not using our balcony.

The Swiss sticker shocker took us by surprise. Our first evening, we ordered a small personal pizza and a half portion of spaghetti for $35! The kicker was that the waitress refused to bring us more than two glasses of tap water for the four of us, explaining, “You did not order enough food for four glasses.” The rest of the week we hit the markets and ate Museli and milk at breakfast, bread with deliciously creamy Swiss cheese for lunch and $45 dinners in restaurants. Meals, by the way, were always served without vegetables. We have never craved a good head of broccoli so desperately.

The Swiss countryside was pastoral, with lovely mountain views, a visit to the cheese makers in Gruyere, idyllic drives, medieval castles, fun funiculars and enough milk products and chocolate to seduce a lactose intolerant person into a stupor. Nonetheless, we were looking forward to returning to the exciting energy of Paris for our last night of vacation.


The city of Paris was abuzz. That very night, France would compete against Italy in the World Cup Soccer Finals. We high-tailed it to the Champs Elysee, where the road was mobbed with folks peering through restaurant windows, trying to get a glimpse of three of four tiny TVs. We marveled at the missed opportunity for capitalism. Americans would have set up big screen TVs everywhere, and charged admission! We slipped down a quiet side street towards the Eiffel Tower, and watched the match at a Chinese restaurant. At 11 p.m., as the game went into overtime, the children’s eyelids drooped, but they shook off sleep at the prospect of seeing the Eiffel Tower lit up at night.

By a hair, France was defeated. We strolled through the streets of heavy disappointment until we spotted the glimmering lights of the iconic tower. The magnificent image raised our spirits all the way home. Even through Iceland.