Tips for Staying Sane

How to Stay Sane

This is part of a survival guide I have figured out while traveling. It’s easier when there are two parents traveling because when situations get too much for one adult the other can take over. Things have been pretty intense at times over the past 14 months; Katie and I have been together pretty much all the time apart from the odd hour or day here or there. If someone so much as offers to take her for an hour I pretty much throw her into their arms.

The advice books say when things get too much then walk away, go into another room for a while, but when you are just living out of one room, or maybe if you are couchsurfing, you may not even have a room to yourself, where do you go?

Frayed nerves

I set some ground rules with Katie pretty early on in life that said that when mummy is in the bathroom, no matter what she is doing, she is not to be disturbed! What I often do is go for a shower and leave Katie watching a movie on the laptop. This all depends on how old your child is; can they be left unsupervised while you disappear into the bathroom? Katie is really good; she’s out of the mischievous destructive stage if not out the super precocious stage yet. By the time I have had a shower I feel refreshed and reinvigorated and better equipped to deal with the frustrations.

All kids blow up at times but when you are traveling and in constantly changing surroundings, combined with tiredness from moving around it can trigger off frustration and frayed nerves for everyone. It’s made worse when you are in a hotel, guesthouse, street, or someone else’s home if you are couchsurfing, there’s nothing else that makes you feel as scrutinized and under pressure as those moments when strangers are watching how you react and whether you are successful in diffusing the situation.

It’s also a big cultural no-no in many places to lose ones rag in public which just adds to the mortification and horror if you have to deal with a child mid temper tantrum.

I know that I am asking for trouble if I expect Katie to spend from breakfast till dinnertime cramming in sightseeing like TWOKS (travelers without kids). It’s a trade off, rather than rushing round lots of places may visit one sight in the morning, spending a few hours really exploring the place well, and in the afternoon we will sit in the park, try and find a playground, or hang out in our guesthouse talking to other travelers or playing games.

Picky Eaters

We once went on holiday to Turkey on a half board deal. It was fantastic and come meal times I have never seen such an amazing array of food. It took a lot of willpower to not pile ones plate full and carefully, as if walking a tightrope should one of your many precariously placed items on your piled high plate unbalance, sending the whole mountain of food tumbling down, make your way back to your table. I am not being OTT, the food really was that good. Amongst the many platters of food Katie had a knack of zooming in on and insisting on eating only food that was white. Night after night she would eat steamed rice, spaghetti with no sauce and boiled cauliflower. As the plates were white as well you couldn’t see the food.

Knowing I was dealing with an uberpicky eater in the run up to this trip I took her to as many restaurants as I could trying food from all the countries on our route. Living in London this was fairly easy, each suburb is like a culinary United Nations, it’s finding a decent place to drink that poses a challenge, but that’s for another, none child related post. If we didn’t have the luxury of living in such a cosmopolitan setting I would have searched the internet and found recipes and cooked different cuisines at home involving Katie and encouraging her to help me make dinner. I could have done that anyway, but I am just too damn lazy when it comes to cooking. In the detached and exciting setting of a restaurant she still turned her nose up at everything placed in front of her.

If I cooked Katie would turn her nose up if I so much as add salt and pepper and would reject it. I drove myself to almost despair thinking how I was able to come up with plans for most things on the road, until it came to figuring my daughter out.

If you have a picky eater there is nothing much you can do short of being patient and trying new things constantly, or caving and heading to the nearest McDonalds at mealtimes. I encouraged Katie to try eating local food when we traveled and more often than not we found something in every country that she could stomach.

In Turkey it was a particular kind of kebab, in Syria she discovered a love of french onion soup, Jordan was tough and there wasn’t much choice as it was Ramadan however we found lots of places that sold rotisserie cooked chicken that she would eat. Israel proved to be a nightmare, as she would only eat sushi, wanting it for breakfast lunch and dinner, which I didn’t go along with so we sought out the ubiquitous spaghetti bolognese. In Thailand we eventually found she liked vegetable fried rice and chicken on a stick, in Laos she had a love affair with sticky rice and would eat it constantly, sometimes with stir friend vegetables. In Cambodia she decided she didn’t like vegetable after all and would only eat steak. Malaysia was hard work, in Bali she ate chap chay, which is, stir fried vegetables and rice. And then when we returned to Thailand to tour the islands she discovered, after nearly eight years of making gagging noises if she saw one, that she liked pizza, but only margarita, she would reject it if it had even an accidental sprinkling of herbs or anything else. The USA was easy but Mexico is proving to be tough but she’s not going hungry.

I try never to make food an issue but I do encourage her to try new things and though she has protested at times, she has given an embarrassed giggle and smile after and told me she likes what I’ve suggested and then the food problem for that town is over. I also just figure that she’ll eat when she’s hungry enough and there have always been places to buy fresh fruit or minimarts to buy cheese and crackers and I always make sure she takes a high quality supplement every day.

You’re at the airport/bus station/train station/anywhere on the street with your bags and your kid is acting up and providing a necessary distraction for any would be bag thief

Eurgh! I hate this one! Just when you need your wits about you, the both of you are tired and ragged; it’s that moment when your kid goes into meltdown!

This is the time when you need nerves of steel! I tell myself that however stressed we both are our problems our only going to be added to if our bags get stolen. I would be lying though if I said I have never snapped when this has happened but I do try and follow my pre-thought out survival plan of telling Katie that I appreciate she is stressed and that I will give her all my attention as soon as we are on the plane/train/bus/at our destination but until that happens we have to work together. Sometimes it works better than others.

Something else I used to do, not so much now that I am more experienced and travel savvy, therefore more confident in new surroundings, is that if I couldn’t put my backpack on straight away after getting off a bus or out of a taxi or had to take my eyes off it then I would tell Katie to sit on it. I still do this if I have to take my eyes off my bag, however nowadays I just usually throw my backpack straight on my back and then pay the driver/check the map/blow my nose, whatever it is that needs doing.

Your kid is worn out, had enough and wants to go home as they miss their cousin/grandparents/uncles/aunties/dog/cuddly toy/best friend/even the old man at the end of the street that snarls at them.

I am not going to get smug here and sound like a beautiful, rich, maybe talented, Hollywood starlet and whine about how my life may appear beautiful and wonderful and enviable, but really if you knew just how hard it was…

Ok, I am going to stop with the Paris Hilton routine. Katie and I are both so lucky to have the life we do and every day I thank G-d, my guiding spirits, my bank balance (it’s diminishing rapidly but is still hanging on in there desperately like a dying man who knows his days are numbered), Allah, Elvis, I thank whoever and whatever depending on the day and what mood I am in that we are able to be doing this trip. I dreamed about it for so long and up until two months before we left England I didn’t think it would happen, but it did, it is happening, and I am so thankful to all opportunities that made this possible and the way everything fell into place. But, there are days when I do wonder what the hell we are doing; I wonder what on earth possessed me to actually go through with doing the trip instead of just dreaming about it. I mean, when I was a teenager I dreamed about marrying Brad Pitt, but I’m not exactly about to go knocking on his front door asking for my dues.

Kids love familiarity, some more than others, but all do to an extent, and as exciting as traveling can be to begin with it does start to take it’s toll and travel weariness sets in. It affects grown ups too, but it can affect children more so and they are not as able to pull themselves out of it as adults.

There have been times when Katie and I both feel fed up and particularly around the time when we were in Penang, Malaysia earlier this year, Katie was feeling particularly blue about the trip. We spoke about a lot of things; we cleared our schedule for a couple of days and just chilled and took it easy and weighed everything up. We made some changes to the way we traveled, some we couldn’t implement straight away, but we knew the changes were coming, and we started to enjoy traveling again.

We were both feeling travel weary and with time and some changes we started to feel better. Homesickness is something more serious and doesn’t pass quickly if at all. If either of us had been really pining for home then the only option then would have been to have called it a day and maybe plan to do the other half of the trip another time as a separate adventure.

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Tags: Experiences, travel tips