Bring Grandma; leave the baggage behind

A perennial favorite of the travel industry is the Trend Toward Intergenerational Travel. Websites and magazines have stories about or advertising for riverboat adventures down the Mississippi or Caribbean resorts or backpacking trips across the Alps that are designed with you, your parents and your children in mind.

The people in the accompanying pictures are always bursting with health and familial devotion — Grandpa teaching little Scooter how to reel in that big trout, a middle-aged daughter with the obligatory sweater thrown over her shoulders laughing with her mother as they maneuver their bikes through some French village, both with toddlers on board.

It makes you wonder if part of the package price goes to the procurement of elderly people with the patience to go fishing with a 6-year-old or the stamina to push 40 extra squirming pounds in a bike helmet up the hills of Provence. They certainly cannot be implying that your own parents are going to do this. Your own parents reserve all their energy for telling you and your husband how to drive and for fishing around in those bottomless grandma purses for the tissues/mints/sunglasses/cheese snacks that they knew they put in there.

And yet I have, willingly and more than once, traveled intergenerationally, and although it bore no resemblance to anything in a travel brochure or on an Elderhostel website, I have, and will now, recommend it. And it has nothing to do with the baby-sitting. Believe me.

First off, you avoid the time-space continuum problem that crops up in other family visits. You know, you walk into your parents’ house, even if it isn’t the one you grew up in, and are instantly transformed into your 16-year-old self, rummaging through the refrigerator, throwing gum wrappers on the floor and arguing with your father about your tone of voice. Neither do you have your mother walking into your house, with its carpet of Bionicle pieces and My Little Pony hairbrushes and narrating all the things your children have that you didn’t have “and you turned out just fine.”

When traveling, you are entering a new and neutral territory, somewhere you presumably want to go. (Enforced, unwanted travel does not count; we do not endorse guilt trips of any kind.) I do recommend getting there separately. Driving for days with Grandma could wind up with a Flannery O’Connor sort of ending (not good), and flying with kids is such a high-wire act that you probably don’t want your parents watching.

I recommend self-catering accommodations because there is something fun about setting up temporary house with your parents, as though you were going off to college with them, although you have to give them the first choice of rooms and ones that are as far from the children as possible.

Also, there should be at least two bathrooms. I cannot stress this enough.

Travel with small children and older folks works out wonderfully well in terms of touring because, with apologies to the disco-dancing octogenarians reading this, they usually have similar schedules — up at the crack of dawn, in bed by 9 — and they have the same requirements for regular meals and frequent breaks.

It can be frustrating for both parties when the younger couple wants to walk from the Met to the Empire State Building and the older couple is ready to call it a day. But nothing slows you down and ensures plenty of potty breaks like children. My mother agreed to go hiking with us in Joshua Tree National Park because she was confident she could keep apace with 3-year-old Fiona. Which she did. Taking 14-month-old Danny around County Mayo, Ireland, gave my father plenty of excuses to do what he loved best — sit and watch the clouds chase the light over those endless green hills while his grandson pulled up the clover and shouted at the cows. And his normally impatient, guidebook-toting daughter had to keep her mouth shut.

Going on a trip with your family gives you a chance to cut away all the sticky threads of normal life that often blur our vision, choke our words. You are on an adventure, all of you starting with the same sort of instructions, the same pack of supplies. Without the phone calls and the housekeeping obsessions, away from the sometimes difficult task of fitting your parents in with your everyday life, or them fitting you into theirs, conversations can occur that are not loaded with 40 years of “issues.”

The presence of actual children also provides a talisman against childish behavior by the adults. There’s nothing like a 5-year-old to make you appreciate the restful quality of maturity. And anyway, why compete with the pros?

The best travel is about discovery, about finding places where people and place come together to create moments that transcend the mundane, that exceed even the exciting word “vacation.”

I remember watching my father carrying Fiona and leading Danny through a castle in Donegal, how Danny ran ahead, through corridors and up stairs, coming back to report what he had found, the three of them bound by a quest. Or my mother showing them a tiny church, practically child-sized, but real, on a street in Carrick-on-Shannon, the three of them in rapture. I do not have any memories such as these of my grandparents who died when I was small. Listening to my children talking about the trips, I wish I did.

Some people might be reluctant to travel with three generations when the children are young, often demanding, sometimes impossible. I know on our last trip to Ireland, with a 14-month-old and a 3-year-old, I had my doubts. We stayed for two weeks in a house in County Leitrim with my parents, and it was not perfect. We took wonderful day trips, saw castles and towers and roads bowered by so many flowers and trees that the children thought they were in fairyland. We took a boat ride down the Shannon and ate in many charming pubs, even looked at a house that was for sale and wondered “what if?”

But the house we rented had a steep staircase and no baby gates so we had to keep constant tabs on Fiona, Danny was way too loud for a place with stone walls and floors, and my father was strangely impatient with him and all of us. I wondered several times during the trip if maybe in my travel lust I was pushing things, if it would have been better to wait a year or two, when the kids would be more manageable.

My father died less than eight months later; what had made him impatient was probably the liver cancer that went undetected until it was too late. Now I would not trade that trip for all the four-star hotel stays in the world. Now I would give anything for the chance to stay one more week, a few more days. Why didn’t we? What were we hurrying back to?

My husband and I pore over every detail, every moment with the kids, look at the albums often because it was the longest, and almost the last, time they spent with their grandfather. Now when we talk about going to Ireland again, my daughter sometimes forgets and thinks that’s where Grandpa is. And who’s to say? Given the choice between heaven and Ireland, Dad probably would have chosen Ireland.

None of us know what’s going to happen next, and have you ever really regretted any trip you’ve taken with your family? Would you if you knew it was going to be the last? Do it. Go to Rome or the Smoky Mountains, to London or Death Valley. Take the folks and the kids and any siblings who care to join you. Try to stay within a budget but don’t sweat if you don’t. Take the gondola ride, go to Disney World, watch the sunset over the Grand Canyon with as many generations as you can muster. Because “someday” is a distant and perilous place.