Ever wondered how to pull off the ultimate, chaos-free family holiday with the kids? Travel might not be on the cards for anyone anytime soon, but you can still look to the future and plan your dream holiday with the little ones in tow. Peter Helliar and his wife Bridget Helliar are here to show you how it’s done with their new book, Trippin’ With Kids. Consider it your guide to the happy rainbow of travel experiences that parents can enjoy with their kids, packed with Pete and Brij’s tips and tricks for how to plan, organise and execute a great family holiday.
Today, we have an extract from Trippin’ With Kids on the blog for you to check out. Read on (and start planning that dream trip)!
YOU CAN DO IT
This book is not your regular travel guide book. We wrote Trippin’ with Kids to encourage you, parents with children (of any age), not to put off travelling until the kids have flown the coop. Our boys, Liam, Aidan and Oscar, are getting older by the day (which is totally normal we are told) and we treasure the times we had travelling with them when they were younger – and hope those days aren’t over quite yet.
The thing is, if you put travel off, there’s a good chance you’ll just keep putting it off. We all know that life gets busy, excuses can disguise themselves as reasons and before you know it your oldest is in Year 11 and you can’t easily take them out of school. Or, worse, they don’t want to travel with you because their best friend Scabby’s parents own a holiday house down the coast and that’s much more appealing.
We want to help you see that you can do it now. Even with little ones! You don’t have to start with month-long trips overseas – weekends away are a great way to get the kids used to travelling and are also much easier on schedules and budgets (and sleep-deprived parents!). So we begin the book with our wonderful country and our pick of what you can see and do without leaving Australian shores, before talking about some of our favourite kid-friendly overseas destinations.
Our hope is that, among the practical advice, helpful tips and personal anecdotes in this book, you will find inspiration – inspiration to call a travel agent, to get on the road, to start planning a wonderful memorable family adventure.
Lastly, when reading this book, just keep thinking: there is no reason why we can’t do this. Go for it. It’s worth it. The world is waiting for you … and your rugrats!
A CHOICE WE MADE
For us, it was definitely worth it – we’ll explain why. Six years into our marriage we decided we needed to hit refresh. We wouldn’t call it a rut as such, but perhaps it was knowing that the infamous seven-year itch may or may not have been just ahead of us – we decided to take pre-emptive action. A friend of ours suggested a marriage counsellor, which sounded way over the top to us; we thought that counselling was for couples trying to desperately cling to the final threads of their relationship. That was not us. We were good. We just wanted to be better. Turns out that’s actually the perfect situation for relationship counselling – you don’t wait for the bitter end to save something you love. So we had a few sessions and found we enjoyed investing the time to talk honestly about our marriage, our relationship, how we got here and, most importantly, where we wanted to go.
What we quickly realised was that we wanted to bring travel into our marriage. We had always thought that we would wait for our three boys to get older before we all travelled overseas, but after talking about it we decided not to wait any more – if we waited for the kids to get older then we would be older too. We didn’t want to explore the Pyramids on walking frames, so we got cracking, opened a bottle of bubbles and started pitching destinations, dates and a budget.
It was instantly thrilling. Suddenly our marriage wasn’t just about these four walls, endless laundry, Saturday sport and school lunches. It could be vineyards in France, pizza in Rome or Central Park in New York. We could chase summers, hike Tibet or run with the bulls in Pamplona (although running with the bulls with a BabyBjörn is highly discouraged – or just running with the bulls at all to be honest!).
After spinning globes, eyeing maps and consulting with the kids, it was decided the Helliars would travel to France in October 2010 (a week after the AFL Grand Final) with our three boys: Liam, who was eight, Aidan, five, and Oscar, two. We had taken two of the boys to Fiji when they were young but six weeks in France with three kids was an all-together different ballpark.
It was actually no surprise that travel provided a tonic for us: we have always loved travel and, even before we met, it had been a big part of our lives. Pete had travelled to Europe straight out of school after making some fast cash working down at the Melbourne docks (he calls these his Bon Jovi years even though he packed 25kg bags of sugar into shipping containers for no more than three months). Brij had backpacked through Europe several times and travelled to the United States and Asia too.
Ironically, we actually met, if you can call it that, at an airport. Gate Lounge Two at Sydney in fact. Waiting for his plane to Melbourne, Pete saw an attractive woman reading a book across from him. Pete didn’t speak to her, instead hoping that luck may play its part and miraculously seat him next to her on the plane. Luck said, ‘You’re dreaming, Helliar!’ and seated the woman a safe distance from the up-and-coming comedian. When they landed in Melbourne, Brij was met by her family and Pete took the shuttle bus to his car.
And that was that.
But it wasn’t, was it? Of course it wasn’t. This book wouldn’t exist if that was that.
So, this is that … A few nights later Pete was booked to perform a stand-up comedy set. Before his set, he spotted a friend of his, Anna, at the bar, and worked his way through the crowd to say hi. Then he saw that Anna had a friend with her – that friend, believe it or not, was the girl from Sydney Gate Lounge Two.
And we’ve pretty much been together ever since.
LIAM’S OSKAR SCHINDLER STORY (OR, WHY WE TRAVEL)
Our trip with the kids to France was such a success that we started planning and saving for a new overseas adventure, even though it meant taking the boys out of school again.
Of course, it’s up to every parent to consider the benefits of travel against the time a child will miss in the classroom. For us, though, it was this next trip that confirmed we’d made the right decision and it has shaped the way we look at taking the kids out of school for travel.
During our trip to Poland in 2012 we had decided to spare our kids the heaviness of a trip to Auschwitz but, after doing some research, we discovered that the Oskar Schindler Factory in Krakow was a great middle-ground.
Sure, there were still some facts to discover that ranged from unpleasant to horrifying but this museum, set in the old factory where Schindler worked to save 1200 Jewish men and women from the camps, is more than anything a place of hope.
Liam, our eldest, had just turned ten, Aidan was seven and Oscar, four. They all approached the museum differently. Oscar zipped through it like he was trying to win a race. Aidan checked out artefacts and looked at photos of Krakow during the time of Nazi Occupation. But Liam – well, he took longer. He spent time reading the stories behind the photos and the artefacts. He read letters from children living in the ghettos. He learnt about Oskar Schindler’s mission. He took it all in. Pete, standing outside the museum after chasing Oscar to deliver the news that this wasn’t in fact a race and that there would be no award ceremony, had to wait and wait for Liam and Brij before they finally emerged.
After our visit, we debriefed over some delicious golonka (stewed pork knuckle). We wanted to make sure the kids were taking the right messages from the experience, that rather than focusing on the ghastly images of concentration camps they could see that even in our darkest hours there is light. It was a good chat and we patted ourselves on the back for providing them with such a valuable experience. But it wasn’t until we got back to Australia that the full value of those two hours was revealed.
Liam had been back at school for less than a week when his class was asked to write a short essay on somebody they considered a hero (we can only assume parents were off limits as Liam didn’t seem to consider us an option). Many of his classmates had decided to go for their sporting heroes: Aussie cricket captain Ricky Ponting, then Collingwood footballer Dale ‘Daisy’ Thomas and athlete Cathy Freeman were popular picks. Liam, his travels still fresh in his mind, chose Oskar Schindler. Many in his class understandably didn’t know who Oskar Schindler was so Liam stood in front of his peers and told them as much as he could remember about Oskar Schindler.
It obviously made an impression because the next day more than half the kids came to school with new heroes in mind for their essays. It seems that the kids went home, talked about Schindler and what makes a hero with their parents, and came back to school with new non-sporting heroes. War surgeon and prisoner of war Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, Paralympian and Kokoda Track ‘crawler’ Kurt Fearnley and esteemed eye surgeon Fred Hollows were some of the kids’ new heroes.
Liam’s project was pinned up proudly in the school library and has also gone down in our family legend as one of the reasons we travel. This is just one example of the wonderful experiences that can come from travelling with kids and it’s why we want to encourage you to get on out there. So go for it!
(By the way, Pete is still waiting for Liam to do a project on him.)
–This is an edited extract from Trippin’ with Kids by Peter and Bridget Helliar published by Hardie Grant Books $34.99.
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