Our kids join the crowd chasing giant bubbles in Ghent, Belgium. This was one of those magical travel moments you couldn't possibly plan, and we spent a solid half-hour there with the kids shrieking and bouncing around while we fed Euros into the hat of the man making the bubbles.Shannon Proudfoot/The Globe and Mail
“All I want is to sit at a table in a city square drinking a Belgian beer while they climb on the base of a fountain or something,” I said to my husband over and over as we planned a European vacation with our three young kids. I repeated this the way you might beg a slot machine to pay out just a few hundred dollars: I’m not being greedy here, don’t I deserve this modest win?
We figured we would either emerge from this trip as geniuses who had cracked the code on how to be a person while being a parent, or we were soaring toward the sun on wax wings, crowing about what a great idea it was.
When we travelled before we had kids, this is what Geoff and I used to chase: Excellent beer. Museums. History. Architecture. Old art. Lingering for hours over food and drink.
That is also a pretty solid list of activities likely to inspire children to riot.
But we were determined, as we planned our first real family vacation, to recapture a little of that pre-child sense of discovery, with lots of necessary adjustments for our nine-, six- and three-year-old travel companions. We had no interest in spending a hefty budget on a “kid-friendly” trip that would maroon us at some screechy, sun-baked amusement park, sadly contemplating the much better places we could have gone for the same amount of money.
The planning stage
Our first smart move was to ask my mom to come with us. She is SuperGrandma, very close with our kids, a genius at handling children and exactly the sort of joyful and easygoing company you’d wish for while travelling. She was happy to let us play tour guides, so the destinations and logistics were up to us.
Two of our kids balance on a fountain in Ghent, Belgium. Urban landscapes are perfect for children because they can always find something to climb or explore.Shannon Proudfoot/The Globe and Mail
We planned for late September and early October, figuring we’d miss the high-season rush but hoping for comfortable exploring weather. I’m not sure what we did to deserve this, but the weather was sunny and 20 to 25C every single day of our trip, which made everything so much easier and enjoyable.
Recognizing that we couldn’t hopscotch from one big metropolis to another the way we used to, we focused on choosing smaller cities where we could base ourselves for multiple days at a stretch.
We adore Belgian beer and spent a perfect week in Bruges when our oldest was a toddler (she stayed home with her grandparents), so Ghent was immediately on our list: moody medieval architecture scattered along charming canals, burnished old pubs serving the world’s best beer, a city more about being than doing.
Years ago at a conference, my husband met a man from Lille who raved about the northern French city for its wedding-cake architecture that made it “la petite Paris,” its slightly gritty character and overlooked charm. Both were within a 90-minute train ride of Paris, which gave us plenty of flight options. We decided to spend five nights each in Lille and Ghent, followed by three in Paris.
When we searched for Airbnb properties, we took the opposite approach from travelling on our own, when we booked the cheapest centrally located accommodations we could find, knowing we’d be on the move all day and just needed a place to sleep. This time, we splurged on apartments and townhouses that gave us a comfortable place to sleep and a pleasant home base when we needed downtime.
Keeping it simple in situ
Our kids in the elevator zooming up the Eiffel Tower. They were mesmerized by the mechanics of it all and the view from the top, and building an Eiffel Tower replica is a popular project with their blocks now that we're back home.Shannon Proudfoot/The Globe and Mail
Immediately after we landed and started exploring, we realized that one of kids’ quintessential qualities – their ability to be fascinated by the most mundane facets of everyday life – was perfectly suited to travel. High-speed trains; city trams and buses; unfamiliar brands of breakfast cereal, yogurt and chips; cobblestone streets; people speaking French or Dutch; buildings and houses that looked nothing like home; a closet-sized elevator in the apartment building in Paris – all of it mesmerized them.
Of course, they were blown away by floating up the Eiffel Tower in an elevator to gaze down on Paris like a trio of hyperactive gargoyles. But if I’m being honest, I don’t think that delighted them more than the ordinary adventures we had or the sublime little surprises travel always offers.
There was one afternoon when we noticed giant bubbles floating across the square in front of Saint Nicholas Church in Ghent. The kids spent a solid half-hour shrieking and chasing them, while we happily fed euros into the hat set out on the sidewalk by the man making the bubbles.
On a different day in Ghent, we stumbled across a tiny trampoline park right beside Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, so the adults alternated between supervising the manically bouncing kids and ducking into the church to visit Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s astonishing, luminous altarpiece, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. A coffee shop across the street supplied Liège waffles studded with caramelized puddles of pearl sugar to keep the hangries away.
Okay, we tried one theme park
We planned one day that was purely kid-friendly, and while we thought it was the adults taking one for the team, it ended up being wonderful all around. We visited Cita-Parc in Lille, a tiny, adorable amusement park next to the city’s Citadel. The rides looked like they’d been designed by the enchanted forest animals from Snow White, with classical music piped over outdoor speakers. It was small enough that we could nearly let the kids have the run of it while keeping them in sight as we relaxed in a sunny concession area that served good Belgian beer.
Finding kid-pleasing food wasn’t hard in a part of the world where frites and gaufres (waffles) are elevated to an art form, but we still managed to expand their palates. The six-year-old became obsessed with “the mustard that burns your nose” in Ghent, which is interesting for a kid known to complain about toothpaste being too spicy. Our nine-year-old is deeply skeptical about cheese, but she was elbows deep in a cheese plate in Paris when she announced, “I think I’m going to like cheese after being in France.”
My one big regret
My kids and husband explore one of the Louvre's grander galleries in Paris.Shannon Proudfoot/The Globe and Mail
The kids’ capacity to be fascinated by the quotidian meant we didn’t have to do much to keep them happy while we were wandering a city, but when the grown-ups craved a dose of history or culture, we had to work harder. Some attractions provided audio guides or tour booklets that were designed for kids or worked well for them, and we cherished those places.
At the Louvre, I wrote up a scavenger hunt list for the kids to locate objects in the art they were definitely, seriously, for real not allowed to touch, with the promise of an ice cream prize at the end. This absurdly hopeful attempt to spend a couple of hours basking in one of the world’s great museums ended up being a stressful, sweaty exercise in futility.
It was my one big regret of the trip. We’d been in the Tuileries Garden earlier in the day for a truly bucolic few hours of strolling, merry-go-round rides and a fairy tale playground hidden in the trees. We should have just stayed there, basking in the easy, sunny peace of it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing my mom and art-obsessed daughter to Paris for the first time and not introducing them to Mona Lisa and some of her famous friends.
It turns out travelling with kids is just like regular life with them: simpler is better, there will never be enough time for everything – and sometimes it’s only possible to relearn those painful lessons when you overshoot the mark.
In the end, I don’t remember us living out my exact fantasy of a café table and the kids clambering on a fountain. But this trip gave us what we wanted: an opportunity to make memories for our kids showing them a place so different from home, and a chance to visit our past, childless selves – even if only in a rush.
It’s important as a parent to remember who you used to be, and to introduce your kids to those people, too.
If you go
My family strolls along the canal near St. Michael's Church in Ghent, Belgium. We realized we'd wildly over-estimated our three-year-old's ability to walk all day, so we bought a cheap stroller to use on the trip and then borrowed one of Ghent's free loaners when our stroller wasn't up to navigating the city's cobblestone streets.Shannon Proudfoot/The Globe and Mail
Time zones are your friend: We only partially adjusted the kids to the six-hour time difference, which meant we could eat dinner at 7 or 8 p.m. without (much) crankiness, and everyone slept late.
Go small or stay home: Picking smaller and less touristy cities where we could just “be” instead of sprinting from one highlight to another was exactly the right idea. We didn’t exactly regret Paris – who can regret Paris? – but the stress-to-enjoyment ratio was different there.
Pace yourself: We made a conscious effort to alternate days – or, more often, chunks of a day – that featured “booorrring” adult activities with kid-friendly sights or a few hours of feral time in a park or city square. When things went wrong, we slowed down, regrouped and tried to learn something to make the subsequent days better.
Embrace the prefab tour: Once, we would have turned up our noses at cheesy preplanned tours in favour of wandering on our own. That’s foolish when travelling with kids. In Lille and Ghent, we downloaded scavenger hunt apps that let the smalls steer us through the city while the adults got a walking tour. In Paris, we did a hop-on hop-off tour where we comfortably saw more of the sprawling city from the upper level of an open-topped bus than we ever could have on our own.
Don’t overstep: We realized on our first day that we’d wildly overestimated our three-year-old’s energy for walking, so we bought an inexpensive stroller and drove it into the ground over the next two weeks, then left it behind in Paris. It was the best semi-disposable $80 we ever spent.