Travelling With Your Kids In the Summer Holidays: Could There Be Anything Worse?

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To quote Homer Simpson one further time, ‘It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.’

The summer holidays are, for kids, an extraordinary quest to knock down the doors of fundom. The six week hiatus from the routine of school life is incomparably magnified in their developing minds. For adults, who, let’s not forget, have been children, this perception of time has been lost in the mire of self-doubt, social whims and whiles and sexual hormones that dominate the world of grown ups.

It’s tough being a grown-up. Lack of hair is one problem
We cannot recall a time when the period between waking up and children’s TV was equivalent to watching an entire ice age pass, a time when a trip to the grandparents’ house took as long as forming and destroying entire solar systems. For kids, there is no such thing as a quick day. You will never hear anyone under the age of 12 pause on New Year’s Eve, turn to their ma or pa and say, ‘That year has flown by, hasn’t it?’ Kids are assimilating too much on a second by second basis to have anything other than an epic, information-packed day. For them, boredom is measured in seconds, not hours. Herein lies the key to the conflicts and dangers of travelling with your kids in the summer holidays.

I’m bored!

We shall come to air travel later, but let’s begin with the guaranteed horror of the car journey. Anything beyond a 10 minute trip to the shops is going to result in a fierce battle of wills between parent and child. Sure, there are coping mechanisms – a tape of favourite Disney songs, a seat-mounted DVD player if you can ever possibly afford it. I was once given an empty cardboard tube by my dad, a man whose patience was, at worst, saintly. It took me a few years to connect this tube of outrageous fun (it’s a telescope, it’s a periscope, it’s a rocket launcher!) with the pile of unused toilet roll stuffed into a spare shopping bag in the boot. To this day the idea of my father rapidly wrapping this toilet paper around his outstretched arm to get at the tube of mercy fills me with warmth and fondness.

Don’t mention it…are we nearly…

One other thing that tends to fill children with warmth is the need for a pee. This triggers a certain blind panic in the mind of any parent on a motorway journey. Stopping at service stations will not help matters because the kids are too distracted by the claw machines and mythical rest stop news vendors filled with pick ‘n’ mix and oversized bars of chocolate to even think about relieving themselves. Inevitably, the hard shoulder becomes a portaloo as anxious parents guide their children into the grassy verge, wondering whether they need to arrange some cones or perhaps a hazard triangle in order to protect their offspring.

Never a service station, always the hard shoulder

Still, problems outside of the car are nothing compared to problems inside. Whether you have one child or six, there is no escape from the restless, almost Caligula-esque attitude that kids adopt when they are bored, which, as we have already covered, happens at a rate incomprehensible to anyone old enough to drive a car. You may try and placate them with some poor excuse for a ‘game’, but when four year olds are caning the high levels on Grand Theft Auto 4, ‘I Spy’ no longer cuts it. So, as a child, it only makes sense to vomit. Any parent who attempts to fill their kid’s life with the wonders of the world will have experienced an in-car chunderstorm. There is no way to counteract it, especially when your little boy or girl is crying while being sick, and your spouse is desperately scrambling into the back seat without immersing themselves in the stuff.

You’ll need one of these

At least in a car you have the ability to pull over and run for your life, abandoning any notion of parental altruism in favour of a pint of Vodka and a night of denial. In a plane, there is no such luxury. Most likely, in order to cover the costs of travelling with a burgeoning family on a salary not yet designed to support more than a bachelor living in a flat on a tin of beans, you have had to organise flights at silly o’clock in the morning, waking your kids before their precious REM sleep is complete and forcing them into a strange car to go to a strange place filled with very annoyed adults who, for the first time, look more bored than the kids do. This is before you even go through the check-in process, which is a war of attrition between your nerves and your patience. Forgoing any delays (there will be delays) and any tantrums (there will be tantrums) and any problems securing seats together (there will be problems) you might make it on to the plane with your wits just about intact. Beyond that, you become what Scientologists refer to as ‘fair game’.

You will be shattered, but you cannot sleep because you know you will be jolted awake by the Captain who will be pointing and shouting at you because your offspring has somehow managed to trigger a total decompression of the cabin, or has peed all over the seats, or has vomited everywhere but in the sick bag. This is before your little angel has started to complain about the food tasting funny, or not wanting to sit next to the oversized businessman with the offensively large laptop which your kid desperately wants to own right now I want one. Summoning all your powers of persuasion, demonstrating the kind of role model behaviours that you hope will mark you out to others around you as a good, stoic parent, you talk your little one down from the metaphorical ledge. For a moment, your eyes close, and then you hear it, you try to ignore it but there it comes again, gnawing away at you, and suddenly, if only for a second, you wish you had stayed at home:
‘Are we there yet?’

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