Ricky Abroad: Thoughts about Being on the Road with a 5-Year-Old

We’ve traveled a lot since Rick was born in 2005. When he was two months old, we took him to Las Vegas (where he’s been at least five times since), and at five months he traveled to Spain from Los Angeles for the first time. Last year, we spent three weeks in Argentina. And last summer we were in England for a month. When he was two, we traveled from Los Angeles to New Jersey at least seven times. He’s been to sixteen states in the United States.

Because of all this roaming, I know that traveling means fun to Ricky but also stress. One of the ways that stress has manifested in past trips has been through illness. Ricky has all too often thrown up while traveling, even when he had not eaten anything unusual. The stomach trouble is usually accompanied by a very high fever. Also, he has frequently wet his bed at hotels, while at home this is a rare occurrence. Although he enjoys many things about hotels, he dislikes change and wants to remain at whatever hotel he is in, saying he does not want to go to another place, that he likes this one (especially if there's a pool).

Fortunately, Ricky will go to sleep in any bed and tends to sleep through the night. He gets up early and is very hungry in the morning. He can be reluctant to take a bath in hotels, and usually avoids showers.   On the whole, he is very good about staying at new places.

Ricky does not eat a lot of vegetables. He likes ketchup, and tomato sauce, and in the last year he’s started eating the super tasty chard fritters that my mom makes. Occasionally, he eats sweet potatoes. But other than this, Ricky is not picky about food, and we’ve been able to feed him in any restaurant while traveling. His favorite foods are hamburgers, eggs, breaded chicken, and pasta, but he can eat noodles and rice and meat and bread as long as there’s a sauce for him to dip things into. He loves all fruit. He drinks watered down juice and milk, and when very tired, he has a glass of milk as a meal.  This year he has also become crazy about fish.  He likes it no matter how it is prepared, and even enjoys pickled herring.

He loves museums, and although he is the loudest child in the world and tends to get overly excited, he looks at art and artifacts with interest and care. He has a million questions about exhibits, and loves museums that display furniture, and cars, and odd objects. During a tour of Martin Luther King Jr.'s boyhood home in Atlanta, he had a running conversation with the guide, discussing and speculating about the toys and games which were on display, and how the different rooms were used.  He is fascinated with the past, and wants to travel there in a time machine. One of his favorite movies is Back to the Future, and he believes that some cars can take you time traveling.

The plan for our upcoming adventure is to arrange for longer stays at some points during the trip, so that we’re not constantly moving from one hotel to the next. This, we hope, will give Ricky (and us) a time to rest and relax, and to create continuity and a small dose of routine. The first two destinations (Morocco and Egypt) will not allow that, since we are there for only one week in each place. But in South Africa, we’re staying in the same place for two weeks. And later on the trip, we may stay put in Thailand or Malaysia for even longer (this part of the trip is still unplanned). Since we’ll be traveling for months with a 5-year-old, we can’t run around the whole time. We will see what works and what doesn’t, and hopefully Ricky will have a great time.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Traveling around the world for several months at a time seemed like an unattainable dream until recently. In these last few months, we decided we are going to do it. Now that Ricky is small enough and that we have no property or things waiting for us, we are going off to explore.

We chose the countries we are visiting taking into consideration places we want to see and what seems feasible and affordable and fun with Rick. South America is too expensive to add to the pot. I want to visit Peru and Colombia and make a stop in Argentina, but that will have to wait until the next trip. I’ve always wanted to go to India, but we decided we did not want to go to India for the first time with a small child. So that will also wait. Ricky wants to see Russia, but we’re starting our trip in the winter, so we were turned off by the freezing temperatures and the high expense of Moscow and St Petersburg. Another trip.

This adventure will last an indefinite length of time. When we’re tired of it, or our budget demands it, we will stop. In theory, we are open to jobs or opportunities in any of the countries we are visiting. So if Thailand worked out for us, for example, we would consider settling there.

We have bought a few one way tickets, so for about the first six weeks of the trip, we know more or less where we are going to be. After that, it will be more spontaneous. We own at least sixteen current travel guides (and a few maps), all bought in the last few weeks, but of course we can’t travel with that much weight. So we’ll have to gather ideas now, write things down, depend on the internet while we’re on the road.

Are we coming back to live in Spain after the trip? It is a possibility, although Spain has been very expensive for us, and jobs here are hard to find. Would we settle back in the United States? If we want to, and we find something to do, sure! We don’t know where in the US that would be.

Ana

How We Will Be Traveling.

When we first decided to take this trip, it seemed that the obvious thing to do was to purchase some kind of Round The World ticket. Each of the major airline groups, Star Alliance, Sky Team, and One World, offers a Round The World ticket option, as do some of the carriers themselves. The options offered by the carriers were very cheap, but were not well suited to our plans. For example, Singapore Airlines will sell you a Round The World ticket for as little as $2,266. The routing options, however, are very limited. Almost all their flights have Singapore as one side of their route. Of all the European flights they offer, there are two that do not go straight to Singapore: Frankfort to New York and Moscow to Houston. If you want to go from New York to Frankfort to Singapore to Tokyo to Los Angeles, it's great.

The Star Alliance and the One World websites offer really wonderful planning tools, with the whole world laid out and the destinations from each city made clear, and you can figure out your whole route and then you can get yourself a price. The Sky Team, though, seems to be a bit reluctant to get in on the fun. They tell you to call you local Sky Team airline, and plan it that way. This is a frustrating experience, as you are asked for your prospective itinerary, when you don't really have one set yet, and makes the whole process much more demanding. For those who were not going to use a computer anyway, I suppose it's fine, but for me, it made even tentatively coming up with a Sky Team itinerary unfeasibly difficult.

The way the itineraries work is that you can change your dates of travel, but not your cities. Star Alliance allows you to change your dates for free, up to a day before you are scheduled to travel. The One World group charge you to change ticket dates. I played around with Star Alliance planning site for a long, long time. Days, weeks, months. The costs varied according to where the trip began, and which cities were selected. Children 11 and under are charged 75 percent of the adult price. It was winding up to be somewhere between $13,000 and $16,000, depending on variations, for the three of us.

Then I began to look into buying individual tickets. I had expected that the costs would quickly add up to and surpass the costs of the package ticket. I was surprised to find out that it did not. Most tickets I have purchased in the past have offered stiff penalties for one-way travel, charging the same or more money than for a round trip ticket. For the routes we were looking at, though, this was not the case. The rise of low-cost carriers in many parts of the world have also made the purchase of the Round The World ticket, which is only a choice on the major carriers, less cost effective. With the collapse of the quality of air travel on the major carriers, they have also given up the edge in comfort they once offered over the discount airlines. The first leg of our trip will be from Madrid to Marrakech. Right now a ticket on Ryanair, direct, costs $9. Easyjet is $14. The price on a major airline? Iberia charges $98. Buying our tickets as we go, letting our journey be our guide and inspiration, not only fits better into the spirit we would like to have, but also winds up being significantly cheaper. This, then, will be a trip where the destinations are not known in advance.

Bryan

And we proceed...

Arrangements have been made. We shall be quitting the scene in under a month, moving onward. It's not that this has been a bad place, but it does not seem to be a place which is sustainable for us. An effort made in good faith, as it were.

My family - myself, my wife, and our five-year-old son, have been in Spain for more than a year, coming here from Los Angeles. Madrid is a fine city, in its way as fine a city as Los Angeles. It has museums, bars, restaurants, and a first rate transportation system that essentially liberates one from the need to own a car. But in the bleakness of the winter, with its short days and biting cold, it will be easy to leave behind.

Our son, Ricky, comes out of school to learn as we go. It was a fine school, and he learned fine things, and met fine people and wore a fine uniform, complete with black shoes and a tie and gray slacks and a jumper. I'm sure there shall be moments when he will miss it.

For now we deal with the dreary demands of our few belongings. Before moving to Spain, there was a great purge of items, a dropping of the detritis which had accumulated in a dozen years of stability. We traveled with suitcases, bringing little. We left many things with my sister, who has been kind enough to keep things for us, looking toward a future day when our feet touch ground in a place we decide to stay, and our items can be brought together and unpacked, and we can live in a museum of our own devising. At the moment we have little, but enough to be troublesome, as we lack a place to keep our things. Our furniture means nothing to us, wonderfully fungible items bought at low cost and utterly free of sentimental value, although the waste of usable items still grieves. So we shall rent a space, store what is worth storing, and retrieve it when we can. We give up our apartment without regret. It has served us adequately, but it lacks charm. Cut from all ties to property, real or personal, we set forth with carry-on luggage, tickets for Africa, and plans for Asia and the world to the east.

Bryan