Summer is here and time is right for dancing in the streets. Well, maybe not, if you have little kids under your supervision. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a great vacation with kids. In so many ways, time off with kids is more meaningful and enriching than a week on the beach without them ever could be.

The first rule of thumb for planning any family adventure is to figure out what will work for the entire family. Normally, I’m not one for saying that having kids should hold you back from doing the things you love to do. To the un-ending misery of fellow travelers, we took our babies on 12 hour plane trips to the other side of the world where we let them sleep on our laps while we ate long gourmet meals. We refused to let their tiny existence ruin our plans, and they often did not throw up or even break too many things. But now that they are older and have opinions and their own desires, we have to admit that things are more complicated.   
Here are a few things we learned along the way:

Traveling with Babies

Babies are cheap and immensely portable. Pushing a stroller is like having a perpetual shopping cart where you can also store extra clothing, purchases and even a snack and bottle of wine.  Babies remind you that you need a nap and provide a wonderful reason to stop and sit in a park. They change the rhythm of a holiday in a positive way if you can appreciate it.

As a dad, I traveled with a five month old and four year old from San Francisco to New York. Everyone treated me as if I had accomplished the most heroic effort of my life and I certainly didn’t play down my travails when I met my wife at the other end. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve always found the horrors of travel with babies way over-stated, even when traveling alone. The fact of the matter is that during this  time period of “life with babies,” you’re in the baby zone and little that they do can fluster you in the same way as if it were a crisis you had to endure outside of parenthood. Even standing in an airplane bathroom over the Pacific for what I remember as hours holding a baby crying about teeth or congestion, I’ve never regretted bringing our kids along on a trip.

Carefully plan travel with babies, though, making sure you have enough diapers and formula, which are never as easily available as you think they will be.  And, think twice about African safaris or anything labled “must-see adventures on a Harley.”

Surprisingly, big cities make good vacations with little kids since you can often walk them around different spots, sticking them in strollers. New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago are great cities for walking holidays that provide a lot to see just by wandering from place to place on foot. Unfortunately, most other U.S. cities are too spread out to tour in this way.