Family Tourism
We just got back from a two-week family trip to Switzerland and England.
We’ve taken our kids to Europe one other time, in 2019, a year that felt light and cheery at the time and a year that, in hindsight, given all that came after it, feels even lighter and even cheerier, and in ways, possibly made up.
Still, when we took off for that trip, we were nervous. Even straightforward travel felt crooked and scary with our youngest. We worried — would sleepless flights and profound jet lag and thrown-off medication schedules be seizure triggers? Would we go to great lengths to get somewhere only to end up in a dark nowhere, far from my son’s neurologist and hospital and reliable couch?
As is the case with all of life, only trying would tell. There was no way to know how elastic my youngest’s health was without stretching him, our nerves. Without risking the snap. So when we traveled, we scaffolded. We brought someone who could hawk-eye him, who could stay in an air-conditioned hotel room with him, on some other couch, if it ended up being 95 degrees outside on a touring day, a temperature his body could not abide. I know this: this is a lucky thing to be able to do. And I also know this: this created parallel vacations, the one my son was on and the one the rest of us were on.
