Why We Travel

Lets be frank here: traveling with kids is a pain in the butt. (I can think of other adjectives but this is a family-friendly blog, folks). Traveling from Singapore comes with its own unique set of hurdles when when it comes to traveling with children. I mean, all you parents know what it's like to travel with young kids: the gear, the short attention spans, the tantrums, the lack of sleep and quality meals. Of course, we have those things but with a few additional complications.

As I have mentioned before, Singapore is a tiny island and if you go more than 20 miles in any direction, you will need to carry a passport and go through an immigration checkpoint of some sort. This requires passports and your long-term passes and, depending on destination, visa purchases. In our pre-kid days, it seemed exciting: another stamp in the ol' passport, another country on the list of places you had been. I had all my passport info memorized so I could fill out my immigration forms and departure cards in less than a minute. This often happened mid-flight while indulging in a ridiculous romantic comedy and a mini-bottle of complimentary wine. Now it takes me 45 minutes to fill out 3 immigration forms while trying to chase down a pre-two-year-old and stay in eye contact of my husband who is dragging some 14 odd bags that we brought for a quick weekend getaway. I have heard that Singapore has enacted a policy to expedite the immigration process for residents by providing a finger-print scanning machine. So if you can remember your residence pass and your finger, you can fly through immigration in 5 minutes.  I wouldn't know about this because I happen to have a child who is under 6. For parents of young children, you must line up with all the other tourists and business travelers and Asia-backpackers in the slow lane and have someone manually check your passes. Meanwhile you wait and stare enviously at the next-to-non-existant line under the "Residents Only" sign (while your child likely opens your suitcase and starts displaying your dirty clothes for those around you).

Another twist to traveling with young children in Singapore, at least in our case, is that we are totally reliant on public transportation for all travels since we do not own a private vehicle. So we need to utilize cabs, trains, buses, planes, tuk-tuks, or boats to reach our destination. We often do in fact utilize all these modes of transportation getting to a single destination. Again, this was fun and exciting when we were a backpack-traveling duo. Now it takes 15 minutes just to load all our crap into each new mode of transportation, and each change increases the risk that we will forget or lose something along the way. So when you start with 14 odd pieces of luggage for your trip, you will likely arrive with only 10. And you most certainly will forget the plastic shopping bag with your only change of underwear, toothbrush, and clean T-shirt that you packed 5 minutes before you walked out the door, while you have somehow managed to remember all of your daughter's stuffed animals. I mean, there are necessities and then there are NECESSITIES.

Once you finally arrive at whatever planned destination, somebody is bound to be haggard, tired, hungry, and prone to throwing a fit. When there was just 2 of us, that somebody was likely to be me. Now of course the torch has been passed on to a much more dramatic and volatile little one. So sometimes in the middle of the chaos, I ask myself WHY we are doing this instead of being home, where Adrienne would surely be sleeping by now and we could be curled up on the couch in our pajamas doing a cross-word puzzle and eating ice-cream straight from the tub.

But then, like we did this weekend, you realize that its easier to reach your inner child while digging in the sand. You realize that your soul needed to unplug and enjoy the natural quiet. You realize that your daughter took her first real swim in the ocean, destroyed several sand castles, and found it hilarious to get burried in the sand. You realize that there are some moments that just won't happen unless you are willing go somewhere.