Is travel, like youth, wasted on the young? She thinks not

The night before our family took a three-week trip to Italy, I stared into the dark for hours, convinced I had made the Worst Mistake of My Life.

Never mind that this trip had been more than a year in the planning — five years if you count the time it took us to hoard enough frequent-flier miles for three free tickets. Never mind that we had spent more time researching and discussing our various destinations and accommodations than we had spent buying our house. Never mind that Danny Mac and Fiona, 5 1/2 and 3 1/2, had already been to Europe (Danny twice) and were proven good travelers. Or that parenthood has trained my husband and me to view any sort of itinerary as a suggestion rather than a syllabus.

Never mind all that. At 2 a.m., I was too busy pointing out to myself that I was taking two children under 6 on a 14-hour plane trip. That Rome is a very busy city and that I don’t know how to say, in Italian, “I have lost my son who is this high and wearing a striped shirt.” Or that Venice is made of water, for heaven’s sake, and Fiona surely was going to fall in, develop a horrible chronic infection like Katharine Hepburn did and never forgive me.

This is the way my mind works at 2 a.m. It didn’t help that since we had gone public with our travel plans, the stock reaction was a look of envious delight that quickly changed to horror when our friends realized that, “Omigod, you’re taking the kids?”

Yes, yes, we always take the kids.

Like many Americans, my husband and I work full time; a vacation apart from the kids is unthinkable. And because we are not extreme tourist types — no ice-climbing in Glacier National Park, no honeymoon trek through the Himalayas — it did not occur to us that having children meant we would have to change our travel plans.

Quite the opposite: Having children made us realize how important travel is. We want Danny and Fiona to think of the world as a wide and wonderful place, to experience how different and the same people can be, never to be afraid of going someplace new and to realize that travel, even overseas travel, is not restricted to the very rich. Or even sort of rich.

That said, we are not insane. We are not, for example, going on safari or to Paris any time soon.

But I think we are not alone. Hence this column, which will, on a monthly basis, share some of the hard-won knowledge we and others have accrued over the years. This knowledge comes in many shapes, from the specific (umbrella strollers are worse than useless on cobblestone medieval streets) to the amorphous (in most European nations it is hard to escape religion, so you should be prepared to explain things like the Crucifixion and the piercing of St. Sebastian in terms you are comfortable with).

My husband and I have found traveling with young children both limiting and liberating, and it has helped clarify what defines us as travelers. For some, a trip abroad that did not allow for fancy meals, high-end shopping and death-march museum-going would be a waste. But Richard and I would rather eat at trattorias under any circumstance, and a stop at Armani would only make the rest of our wardrobe look shabbier.

We agreed early on that because we had been to Italy before and hope to go again, we didn’t need to see every Annunciation and Giotto fresco. Show us a castle, a fortress, a medieval town with narrow, winding streets to wander; show us fountains and stone lions and ruins to climb on, woodland paths and endless terraced gardens, and all four of us are happy.

When you travel with kids, you will have to spend a certain amount of sightseeing time at the local playground and ye olde treat shoppes, but you will also visit places and meet people you would have missed otherwise.

These are some of the things I told my friends when explaining why we were taking the kids to Italy and how great it was going to be. My friends looked at me with patient sympathy, waiting for my medication to kick in.

But as it turned out, the only time I required medication was on that doubt-plagued night.

The trip was practically perfect in every way, partly because every time we travel, we learn how to do things a little better. Between books and crayons and movies and a little PediaCare-induced sleep, the kids were great on the planes. We realized we all preferred breaking the trip a bit more evenly in two, as we did on the way back (Milan to Atlanta to L.A.), than the long haul over (L.A. to Paris to Rome).

Three weeks was just right for a trip involving so much air travel; we gave ourselves time to adjust to the time difference.

We had chosen Italy because of its child-friendly reputation, which turned out to be accurate. Italian cities are great for kids. In Rome, they were thrilled with the simplest things, the statuary and the endless range of drinking fountains. With its storybook streets, pigeons, bridges and boats, Venice was heaven.

Most of the days we spent in cities, we just walked from one fabulous landmark to another with a few stops for gelato and plastic swords. (We were delighted to find that plastic swords, which enhance any trip for children under 10, cost $4.99 just about everywhere. This means you can afford to lose them, making them the ideal travel toy.)

The trip was pretty much made for my kids on Day 3, when it turned out my perfectly respectable dress was too short for St. Peter’s Basilica. Your entire knee must be covered, I was told, so I had to buy one-size-fits-all paper pants from a street vendor. Oh, the kids liked the Sistine Chapel — the baby angels on the walls, the grown-ups staring at the ceiling and the deep-voiced guard intoning “Silenzio” every few minutes — but for sheer entertainment value, nothing beat Mama’s paper pants.

Two of the three weeks were spent with my brother and his partner in a house in Tuscany. This period was just as magical as we had hoped. Having a house or an apartment with a kitchen and enough room to move and shout is crucial to traveling with kids. It also keeps you from going bankrupt on restaurant meals they invariably don’t eat.

A washing machine is another must on a trip longer than a few days. My daughter goes through three outfits a day even without the tomato sauce and gelato. Add the grime of touring an ancient city and make it four. With a washing machine, I was able to pack a week’s worth of clothes for each of us in two manageable bags, and we never had to scramble for clean undies.

In Tuscany we traveled from one hill town to the other and often found ourselves in places like Pinocchio Park in Collodi or the mile-high Medici fort in Cortona, which we never would have visited had it not been for the kids. Invariably, these turned out to be some of the highlights of the trip. It was Danny who convinced us to take a gondola ride at night in a lightning storm; it was Fiona who first tested the waters of the natural hot spring near San Quirico and immediately took off her clothes.

My children are not angelic. We had sulking fits and crying fests and shouting in the car. But we would have had similar fights if we had been going to the grocery store. People are people, and one of the mistakes we sometimes make, even as adults, is expecting travel to miraculously remove every defect of character from our children or friends or spouse. It’s called travel, not transcendence.

We made it to a few museums, though mostly by taking turns, and had several really good meals, though very few linen tablecloths. We walked through some of the most beautiful countryside ever created and through towns so charming they hardly seemed real except for the old men smoking in the piazzas and the old women standing in line at the markets.

There were no lazy romantic mornings in bed, no late-night hot-spot crawls. Sometimes I felt as though I was on a potty tour of Italy; I know I was on a gelato and pizza tour. There was still laundry to do and breakfast and sometimes lunch to make, still arguments over who got to sit in the stroller and who got to ride on Daddy’s shoulders, just like at home. It was as restful as it gets with my two kids, which isn’t very. But it was the best trip I’ve ever taken because it was so beautiful and so fun.

We got to discover things with our children; we let them see things first and show us. We spent time with them — time that was unbroken by work or phone calls, e-mail or social duties.

Most important, we got to see the look on our children’s faces when they first caught sight of the Colosseum, when they climbed to the very top of the bell tower in Siena, when the water bus pulled out onto the Grand Canal and they finally understood what we had been trying for months to tell them about Venice.

Young children have certain liabilities as travelers — short attention spans, inability to carry their own luggage, the potty thing — but no adult face can reflect clear joy and wonder and amazement. Adults have too many filters. Children have none. We saw in their faces exactly why it is we love to travel.

Many people told us our kids were too young to appreciate such a trip, that it would be “wasted on them.” But so many memories of travel are made in the retelling, in poring over the pictures and memorabilia. Danny remembers that archers were once stationed at the top of the Colosseum just in case any of the wild animals escaped, and Fiona, who spent hours waving to the handsome gondoliers from the Rialto bridge, still talks about the city made of water and how she never once fell in.

And if you want to make either one of them laugh instantly, just look at them sideways and say “paper pants.”