We love to travel all over the place, but we also love to play tourist in our own backyard. I started the website Pensacola with Kids a few months ago and what an amazing gift to my family it has been! We have had so many new adventures while we get out there and explore our own city and surrounding areas in between our other travels.
This morning, Little S and I drove around Downtown Pensacola to spot all things red. This is the theme over at I Should Be Folding Laundry’s You Capture this week. We had so much fun on our little scavenger hunt! Pensacola is technically the oldest US settlement but unfortunately it isn’t the oldest continuous settlement. St. Augustine gets that title because Pensacola was wiped out by a hurricane. This year marks the 450th anniversary of Pensacola. I let Little S choose which pictures to use! Enjoy! I think she made some great choices!
Pensacola is also known as the City of Five Flags
Signs like these are posted all over downtown to help direct!
This big guy is one of the Pelicans in Paradise from a few years ago. He is one of the few that remain in a main tourist spot and not in a business.
A theater (no longer in use) constructed in the early 1900s
I think Little S spotted this one to convince me to buy some yummy doughnuts for a snack!
Stop by You Capture to check out all things red this week!
One of my favorite travel blogs is Teacher Meets World. Monna recently moved from Spain to Thailand. Her blog has some new digs too! The new blog, Monna McD, has great stories and beautiful pictures. I love the different effects that she does on her pictures. Be sure to stop by and check out her new look and new posts!
You have kids…but your friends don’t. Or vice versa. Can you still travel together? And will everyone actually enjoy it?
When we were newly married sans kids, we traveled with different friends all of the time. We headed on a cruise to the Bahamas, drove through wine country, celebrated the New Year in Miami, wandered the streets of San Francisco, hit the slots in Biloxi, and saw Aerosmith twice in New Orleans…all with friends, pre-baby! If we could all find an excuse to travel, we did it. Daddy J and I spent a lot of time traveling just the two of us, but we love to travel with dear friends also!
Fast forward a few years, and add my son to the mix. When we got pregnant before most of our traveling buddies decided to have kids, my husband and I thought our days of traveling with friends were over. Fortunately, we were wrong! Now most of our friends have children and when we travel together there may be as many as 10 kids in the mix! Here are a few things that we have learned along the way so that we can still enjoy the adventure!
- Be sure to get separate hotel rooms on the same floor or rent a large house/cabin. You will be changing poopy diapers, up in the middle of the night with a little one who had a nightmare, or serving breakfast as the sun rises. If your friends don’t have children, or if you don’t have kids and your friends do, the extra separation will be nice when family gets a little crazy and you need some downtime. Also, if the little one has a place to lay down at night separate from the group, you will be able to enjoy your evenings together.
Relaxing in the stroller on another group adventure!
- There are lots of things that kids and adults alike can enjoy. You don’t have to alter your plans completely because you are traveling with several children. When considering places to visit, we kept the kids that were going to be traveling with us in mind. We went on a ski trip to Wisp Mountain when my son was a year old. We traveled with two other couples who did not have kids. We played in the snow while they went skiing.
Playing in the snow while the guys ski!
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Consider renting a beach house or camping. Some of our best memories of traveling with friends when Big S was the only child around were the camping trips and beach adventures. While our friends read a book and drank glass of wine on the porch, we built sand castles and splashed in the water. We have lots of pictures of my husband carrying Big S through the hiking trails.
- Don’t be afraid to go out and do something on your own as a couple. You might be tired of listening to your friend’s kid’s fire engine toy for the 900th time. At the same time, your friend might be tired of keeping their kid quiet in a non-annoying way! Also, if you don’t want to hit the children’s museum then don’t! I have found that traveling together in groups is much more fun when the group splits up to do his/her own thing too!
Waiting for dinner on a camping trip.
- If you are feeling generous, offer to keep the children while mom and dad enjoy a quick romantic dinner or drink out…it may have been a long time since their last dinner out! If the kids are yours, don’t be offended if the rest of the group wants to go out late and you are stuck at the hotel. Bring a good book!
On a Disney trip…our kids were the only little ones on this adventure but everybody is going to act like a kid at Disney!
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Eat early. You don’t have to skip the fun dinners out because your little one is with you but try to eat a little earlier than usual so you avoid the crowds and can enjoy dinner without the child meltdowns. If you are staying in a rental that has a kitchen, plan cooking some meals in. This will save the whole group money and is lots of fun in the process!
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Be flexible. This is my number one rule for traveling with kids anyway!
Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz (Berlin TV Tower)
In 2005, we traveled with my 10mo son to Europe. We had a whirlwind vacation and got to do so many different things. You can read the first eight posts here: The London Eye, Trier, Germany; Kelty Convertible Backpack; American Cemetery and Memorial; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Zermatt, Switzerland and the Matterhorn, Brussels, Belgium, and Stuck in Bed.
Big S in front of Checkpoint Charlie
Today, for Photo Friday over at DeliciousBaby, I am going to share some photos from our wanderings in Berlin. We spent the majority of our Berlin trip just wandering the streets. At this point, we had been traveling by plane, train and automobile for 2 weeks and we were tired. We were also running out of money! We wandered through many historical landmarks and ate at some fantastic restaurants.
Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche (a church that has been kept in this state as a memorial after it was hit by a bomb in 1943)
View of Alexanderplatz from our hotel room
Statue commeriating the life of Klaus von Stauffenburg at the Bendlerblock (Parts of Valkyrie were filmed here)
Brandenburger Tor
Holocaust Memorial
Buddy Bears in Berlin - These beautiful bears were everywhere!
Checkpoint Charlie
Big S holding the umbrella…it rained the entire trip!
Statue of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels at Alexanderplatz
Fountain at alexanderplatz
Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche
