Travels with Baby: Chungking Express
This week: Greg's family packs up for Hong Kong.
by Greg Allen
December 2, 2006
We're heading to Kyoto tomorrow on a boondoggle, and I can't help but feel we're pushing our luck. My wife is a scientist at NASA, and she's presenting some of her neutron star research at a conference, and the kid and I decided to tag along. It'll be my daughter's third trip to Japan — she's two-and-a-half — but also the shortest. When my wife's X-ray satellite (I love saying that) was being tested we took a three-week trip in August 2004 to a treeless factory town in BF Japan called Niihama (the kid was just five months old), and after the launch last summer, we spent a month in Tokyo when she was a year-and-a-half.
Both times, the kid was so easygoing, and traveled so well, it feels like the only problem was all the people stopping us to say how beautiful she was. (And schlepping the Bugaboo up and down subway stairs got old. And there was that belligerent United guy in Osaka who fought us over our carefully pre-planned lap baby upgrade. And . . .) With a month of time-zone-hopping that'll push our daughter toward Premier Executive status coming as she seems determined to make the most of her terrible twos, we've been more than a little antsy.
Point is, with the kid now a two-and-a-half going on five, we definitely worry that we've used up all our kid travel karma, and the idea of a fourteen-hour flight with a high-spirited toddler is suddenly kind of daunting. And, there's the fact that we're only gone for ten days, not three-to-five weeks, so we'll barely be over the jet lag before we head home. And that we're taking a quick weekend jaunt over to Hong Kong ("a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour") to get some long overdue face-time with a set of ex-pat grandparents. And that ten days after we get back to New York, we head to France for Christmas and New Year's to break in the new heating system in my mother-in-law's old summer getaway in Provence.
We've gotten pretty blasé — or spoiled — about traveling with a kid. But with a month of time-zone-hopping that'll push our daughter toward Premier Executive status coming as she seems determined to make the most of her terrible twos, we've been more than a little antsy.
Gear Decisions: Figuring out what gear to take seems like a big deal, partly because the kid's behavior is totally different on every trip, but mostly because I'm the one who has to carry it.
On the first trip to Japan when my daughter was five months old, car seat and stroller decisions were easy. We took our infant carrier — a Maxi-Cosi Cabrio, the European model that fits on a Bugaboo, and then we left the stroller seat at home. For three weeks, we used our Bugaboo base with the Cabrio on, and it was nearly perfect. We'd drive the base right to the plane and take the kid and carrier on and off with ease. When we'd go to eat, we'd do the same, just park the base at the entrance to a restaurant and drop the carrier next to us.
Last summer, when the kid had graduated to a larger car seat, we had to bring it, plus a stroller. Figuring it'd perform better on the rough paved sidewalks of Tokyo, and out of design-function snobbery, we brought the full-blown Bug. Alas, the Bugaboo turns out to be slightly too wide for most of the subway and train turnstiles in Tokyo. And it's damn heavy, at least when you're hustling up and down three staircases in Shinjuku. The ride on the open road was unparalleled, though.
This time, we knew we wouldn't need a car seat for a car, and it wasn't technically required for the plane. So we debated leaving it at home, rather than schlep it back and forth on trains. Ultimately, because the kid sleeps really well in it, we decided to bring it and store it at the airport. Stroller-wise, this time was no contest: we brought the Maclaren Volo, a super-light umbrella stroller. The car seat slots down nicely into the Volo, and the luggage nestles on top. It's a barebones system we've perfected on our U.S. flights. Frankly, if we didn't have the France trip in a couple of weeks, where we know we'll be driving a lot, I'd be tempted to just take the carseat on a one-way trip to Asia somewhere, ditching it the second it becomes annoying.
Okay, now we're packed. Next: we fly to Osaka!
©2006 Greg Allen and Nerve Media
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Greg Allen's films have screened at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight, and at the DoubleTake, Berlinale, and Palm Springs film festivals. Greg began publishing Daddy Types, the weblog for new dads in early 2004, right before his daughter was born. He lives in New York City and Washington, DC. |
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