Nervousness and fear. I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m worried and scared, and I’ll come right out and say it: I was filled with trepidation.
Toddler traveler trepidation.
My wife and I have traveled by car for three hours with our 17-month-old daughter, but that’s been as far as we’ve ever dared to go. Diapers can explode, lungs can wail and temper tantrums can upset the Earth’s natural orbit.
But we longed to take a trip like we used to and felt the little one was old enough to get a few miles under her wings. So we planned a week-long sojourn in New York with a visit to family in Long Island and a couple nights in Manhattan. It involved planes, trains and automobiles, not to mention subways, strollers, escalators and I think, at one point, a grocery cart.
We’ve always wanted a child who travels well so we could re-commence journeying like in the past — a kid you could throw on your back and scoot off here or far over there. But you just never know if a toddler has the same ideas. You never know if a toddler is a homebody who thinks a trip to the mailbox is plenty ambitious.
You also hear horror stories when you’re a new parent. Planes that have asked families with screaming or misbehaving children to disembark a flight while it’s still in the air. Babies whose shrill cries are so piercing that they poke holes in the airliner’s fuselage. Mid-flight diaper changes that go so wrong, and so bad, that the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling and the plane is sent to the scrap heap after it lands.
Read your airline ticket’s fine print carefully: It says very clearly that if you soil the plane, you buy it.
I imagined all manner of horrors happening in the flight, and I was as nervous as I’ve been in a long time. It didn’t help that I would ask people for advice, only to get answers that came from one of two camps. People either shook it off and said things like, “Oh don’t worry, the worst that happens is she rips part of your face off and the passengers get the rest,” or they laughed and said, “Oh, you’re doomed. Are you trying to get in the tabloids?”
Not comforting.
But we researched it, and felt we were ready. We had dozens of little toys at the ready, and all manner of snacks and beverages. We had old cell phones to hold her attention, and backup plans if it got really bad: “Say, whose kid is this? Somebody want to claim this child?”
We trained and wrote our wills. We looked up information on the Internet and prayed to the travel gods.
And after all the planning and worrying, it went swimmingly. Not just the flight, but the entire trip.
In fact, the problems had nothing to do with the pint-sized traveler. Instead it was the remnants of a tropical storm that sent a liquid onslaught through a hole in my roof as we were getting ready to leave. (Nothing like climbing onto a roof in the middle of a downpour just hours before you catch a plane.)
Or how, while flying in to JFK International, I glanced at one of the aircraft televisions to see that authorities had just arrested a group of supposed terrorists who were planning to blow up THE VERY SAME FACILITY WE WERE ABOUT TO LAND AT! Now, that’s comforting.
The way back we had a three-hour flight delay caused by foul weather and a computer glitch that snarled airline traffic throughout the Northeast the day before. We finally arrived back in Jacksonville at 2 a.m.
But none of it you can blame on my kid, and the toddler trooper weathered it all like she’s been doing it for years.
If anything, she taught me something about going with the flow, and not worrying so much. Although, I am still waiting on the bill for that diaper change.