It's not a vacation, it's a trip

Traveling with three kids is messy, challenging and wonderful. It is nothing like traveling by yourself or with just adults. But we might have figured some things out on our latest adventure.

The dusklight was friscalating in Colorado.

I’m not sure of the first time I heard this, but I know it has been both repeated to me and by me countless times since:

When you have kids, you don’t go on a vacation. You go on a trip.

My guess is that I’ve been receiving and giving that pearl of wisdom for the better part of a decade and exchanging the requisite knowing nods and grimaces with other parents every time.

The distinction between a vacation and a trip might seem like a minor question of semantics to some, but it boils down to this:

The spirit of a vacation is that you go somewhere else and spend time relaxing and/or doing a bunch of fun things that you want to do.

A trip has some of the features of a vacation — the hassles of traveling, the unfamiliarity of new places — without much of the relaxing or agency over things you really want to do.

I’ve been thinking about that distinction for the past couple of days now that our family has returned from Colorado.

It was a trip, to be sure, but it also came closer to having elements of a family vacation than any of our past travel. I don’t think we unlocked any secrets, but my wife and I maybe figured out a few things along the way.

It won’t be relaxing, but it also shouldn’t be stressful.

As I’ve written before, our kids are 10, 7 and 4. Transporting three small people to a place 1,000 miles away is going to be a challenge.

Doing so immediately after they finish school/preschool and a couple weeks after you uproot them from the only house they have ever lived in provides an extra degree of difficulty.

That we finalized plans for this trip while in the midst of moving — after we had committed to buying a new house and selling our old one, but before any of the actual work had been done — might seem a little bonkers.

But my wife and I had a sense that we would want some sort of clear demarcation between the stress of all that and the start of summer here in Minnesota at our new house.

Once we committed to traveling and decided to go to Colorado, the first big decision we made was to fly instead of trying to drive. It helped that flights were (by flight standards) ridiculously inexpensive.

Our big trip last summer was a drive out to the western South Dakota, about nine hours that we still split into two days both ways. Denver is another four hours more than that.

In subsequent years, as our kids get a little older, I think we could drive to Colorado. This year, I think flying was the right move.

I say that even with the fresh knowledge that air travel with kids is complicated. They have favorite toys, stuffed animals and foods that cannot come along for the ride. All those things you love? Pack one of them.

The logistics of flying, in general, are awful. Even when you do everything right — our flights both ways were mid-to-late afternoon so we didn’t have to rush in the morning, we gave ourselves what seemed like plenty of time to get to the gate — time is either elongated or compressed in frustrating ways.

Barely a few minutes into our first long line at the airport, our 7-year-old sat down next to her suitcase and declared loudly and dramatically, “This is a nightmare!”

It took us long enough to get through security that we didn’t have time for an actual lunch but rather a series of million dollar snacks found hastily at the airport gift shop.

Our flight home ended up being delayed by more than an hour because of storms, pushing our arrival time into bed time territory. This was underscored when our 4-year-old yelled and cried for the entire 20-minute ride back to our house because he didn’t like where he was seated in the van.

Even considering all that, though, there is a luxury and magic with flying. Our kids have only been on a few flights, to the point that takeoffs, landings and simply looking out the windows are all still thrilling.

They bring you drinks! And snacks! There are movies! (My wife and I finally got to watch “Oppenheimer,” albeit a few seats apart and split between half on the way there and half on the way home).

And even with all the relative hassles and waiting around, you do save time. You get more vacation (or at least more trip) because you get to hurtle through the air at 500 mph with no stops instead of grinding along at 70 mph with infinite stops. Our son has to use the bathroom five minutes after his sister? No problem! (Well, except that he wants you to join him inside the roughly 9-inch by 13-inch airplane restroom).

In this particular instance, even though flying (and renting a car) was more expensive than driving, it saved us some stress. And I’ve come to believe that being in the right frame of mind is a huge share of appreciating parenting, particularly when traveling.

Your kids don’t have to have the same experiences as you.

We caught up with two sets of old friends who have moved from Minnesota to Colorado while on the trip (more on that in a bit), and in explaining to one of them how the trip was going so far I had something of an ephiphany.

Our kids, I said, would pretty much be happy anywhere we went as long as they got to go swimming, eat a lot of snacks and play a lot. We could drive 50 miles from home and they would be content as long as those bases were covered.

(We failed at that last year, by the way, when we accidentally booked a hotel for the bulk of our stay that we thought had a pool but instead was connected to a water park that cost roughly $11 billion).

The difference between how our kids experienced parts of Colorado and how we might have wanted them to experience it was temporarily frustrating a few times. When our 10-year-old stared at her tablet as we drove through gorgeous scenery, looking up only briefly to say “yay” when we implored her to look at the mountains, we had to remember that she is very definitely a tween now.

When the primary question at every stop was “can we get something at the gift shop?” it felt like the point had been defeated.

As our kids complained about the heat (folks: it was a pleasant and dry 75 degrees) on a very short paved walk through Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, my wife and I allowed ourselves to imagine all the things we would do differently if it was just the two of us on this trip (or vacation, in that case).

But we had to let go of those things. You can’t force kids to see the world through the eyes of adults. You have to at least meet them halfway: to indulge them in countless swims at the hotel pool, ice cream at weird times and at least a couple overpriced souvenirs.

And then you can be heartened when they show genuine interest in and appreciation of the things you want them to experience, like a caribou grazing on the side of the road and getting to see actual dinosaur fossils, replicas of ancient cliff dwellings and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Finding the right rhythm is the key to it all.

On our first full day in Colorado, our 10-year-old was getting antsy. Despite some of her early tween tendencies, she mostly just wants go to a million miles an hour in the direction that she wants to go — which is usually toward something fun. She was frustrated that not everyone in the family has the same energy and that it was taking some time to get out of our hotel room.

I had to look her in the eye, smiling, and tell her: You’re just like me.

“I know,” she replied, also smiling.

And then I had to gently remind her that we are a family of five. When we are on a trip, we have to respect everyone’s rhythm. Our 7-year-old cannot be rushed in anything and lives by some secret clock inside her body. Our 4-year-old has some go-go energy but he is also easily distracted and prone to detours because, well, he’s 4. My wife is up for a lot of things in a day, but she needs some down time and comforts built in.

We ended up finding the right cadence for our days, far more often than not, in large part because they had a lot of variety and all of our non-travel days in Colorado involved at least some time spent with one other family.

Both of the other families we visited in Colorado have two kids, all of them between the ages of 8 and 12, and thus the paradox of children was revealed once again: Particularly when hanging out at someone’s house or in a relaxed situation with wide open spaces, adding more kids to the mix is not a force multiplier of chaos.

It tends, instead, to have the opposite effect. They figure out how to play together and create their own games. They scoot off to jump on trampolines or check out bedrooms, and the adults can actually sit down and have a moment to catch up and have grown-up conversations (usually about kids and/or the ravages of getting older).

And instead of feeling like a tourist trying to pack in all the sights, you’re both doing something and not doing much of anything at the same time. Everyone is happy (at least until they bonk heads on the trampoline).

In the end, hopefully, the back seat fighting and temporary emergencies fade. You learn that pizza, some shade and water are enough medicine in the fight against sun and altitude. You find out that you do, indeed, have an emergency Band-aid in your carry-on luggage when your 4-year-old bashes his leg on an airport escalator.

When you look back at the pictures, you have no doubt you were on a trip.

And you wouldn’t want it any other way.