{"id":2462,"date":"2019-07-05T18:58:46","date_gmt":"2019-07-05T18:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mumblog.co.uk\/?p=2462"},"modified":"2023-09-14T15:02:23","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T15:02:23","slug":"travel-trips-with-the-kids-expectation-vs-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mumblog.co.uk\/travel-trips-with-the-kids-expectation-vs-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Travel & Trips With The Kids: Expectation VS Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"
I remember going on a trip before I had kids. I managed to pack a week\u2019s worth of clothes and toiletries in a small suitcase. It was a glorious time. There were no nappies to take up most of the space. I didn\u2019t have to spend an hour calculating just how many changes of clothes would be required, taking into account possible vomiting episodes, yogurt spillages, and how much access to mud there would be.<\/p>\n
I even managed to travel without the obligatory bag of snacks! These days, travel of any kind, including local day trips and long-haul holidays, requires detailed planning with military precision in order to avoid disaster. But even with all that planning, reality doesn\u2019t always live up to expectations where kids and travel are involved. Honestly, it might be better off to stay at home until they are 18.<\/p>\n
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Farm parks provide a lovely safe way for the children to learn more about agriculture and gain a deeper understanding of where our food comes from, with the added bonus of plenty of play areas where they can run off steam.<\/p>\n
Spend \u00a350 on entry for a family of four so you can spend the afternoon looking at some clinically depressed sheep in a drizzly field before giving into the inevitable and spending the rest of the day by the indoor soft play area. Try not to think about how your local soft play area only costs \u00a35 per child and there is no charge for adults.<\/p>\n
Spend another \u00a330 on lunch, which consists of a half-filled cheese sandwich, a packet of crisps, and some sliced apple that has started to turn brown. Despair when you realise the toddler has found a lump of sheep poo and is playing with it as though it were play-dough.<\/p>\n
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A week long holiday in an AirBNB cottage in the countryside will be a relaxing break for us all. It\u2019s a chance to get away from the stresses of home, work, and school, where we can all just relax. Lovely.<\/p>\n
You spend every waking minute terrified that one of your children is going to smash the various ornaments that your AirBNB host has left out on display. You\u2019ve managed to move most of them to high level spots but there is that massive vase in the corner of the room that looks very expensive and every time the kids venture near to it you flinch. By day two, it becomes apparent that \u201crural location\u201d actually means \u201cmiddle of flipping nowhere\u201d and there is literally nothing to do, except go for long walks in the countryside.<\/p>\n
You forgot that your family actually hate \u201clong walks in the countryside\u201d and you are fed up with the cries of \u201cit\u2019s so booooooring here.\u201d You really wished you had booked somewhere with Wi-Fi, because then you could have at least plugged the kids into their tablets whilst you watched Netflix on your phone.<\/p>\n
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You\u2019ve saved for months to be able to get an all-inclusive beach resort family holiday. It\u2019s going to be perfect. You\u2019ll spend the days relaxing on the beach, whilst the kids run around or spend time in the kids club, and you won\u2019t have to cook a single meal.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hot. It\u2019s really, really, hot. Did I mention the heat? The children have been grumpy the entire time because it is so hot. You give them ice creams to help cool them down but the littlest one still hasn\u2019t grasped that ice creams are meant to be eaten quickly so then you have to strip them of all their clothes and switch to the emergency outfit because everything is covered in chocolate gloop. You try and rinse the outfit in your accommodation\u2019s sink but you just know that gone off milk smell will be taking over your room pretty soon.<\/p>\n
You spend ten minutes every couple of hours dealing with tantrums from the kids about sun cream. You then have to deal with a grown-up tantrum from your partner because he thought he was too cool for sun cream and now resembles a cooked lobster. There is sand in everything, you even find it on your toothbrush. And, to top it off, even though you have spend hundreds of pounds and have travelled thousands of miles to get to this exotic location, your children are still only interested in playing on a tablet.<\/p>\n
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You have fond memories of a childhood trip to Alton Towers and now you can\u2019t wait to make new memories with your children. You have saved up to book a night in the theme park hotel with two full days of theme park access, so that you can make the most of your visit. It\u2019s going to be a fabulous weekend.<\/p>\n
An accident on the motorway meant that you spent most of the first morning playing \u201cI-spy\u201d in the car whilst sat in a queue of traffic. Once off the motorway, you had to join a queue to get into the car park. After you managed to find a space, you had to join another queue to get into the park, even though you bought tickets online. Once inside, you had a choice of a 45 minute long queue for a 3 minute ride, a or 60 minute queue for a two minute ride.<\/p>\n
Your kids got hungry, so you joined the queue for the caf\u00e9, only to find out they had run out of all kids sandwiches and only had tuna mayo on brown bread left in the main sandwich section. In between all that time queueing, you also had to queue for ten minutes every time you or your child needed the loo. At the end of your second day, you have to queue to leave the resort, and then join another queue on the motorway. You\u2019re British, so you are pretty good at queueing, but you\u2019re not sure you wanted to spend a weekend at a resort that would be better named as \u201cQueue-Land\u201d.<\/p>\n