RTW with an Infant and Other Magnificent Feats

Julia and James Hong are not regular parents. They decided to spend the first year of their baby Jackson’s life traveling around the world, and you can only imagine what they experienced along the way! They share their learnings with Momaboard:

In their words:




Many people think it’s crazy to travel with a baby under the age of one, especially around the world. But we think this is the perfect time to do it – before the baby becomes an active toddler. Much of a baby’s first year of life is based on routines. They eat, sleep, and play and your day-to-day life with a baby is pretty much the same. So we thought to ourselves, why not do all of this on the road, with the added bonus of experiencing new cultures and adventures along the way. In October 2009, we embarked on our year long adventure with our then five month old baby Jackson.

Our number one priority on this trip was still maintaining the health and happiness of our baby. We researched all the cities and chose locations that were safe and had very good medical care in case of an emergency. Our physician also provided us with the well baby check-up and vaccination schedule. We followed this to the tee and Jackson came back not missing a beat.

Packing for a year-long trip initially seemed daunting, but once we realized that we’d have to carry all the stuff AND the baby, the process was a lot easier. The first rule of travel is that if you even ask yourself whether you should bring something, the answer is already no. If you need something along the way, you can always pick it up on the road. Along with our day-to-day essentials, the items that made the cut: Baby Bjorn travel crib, Panasonic Lumix GF-1 camera, Maclaren Triumph Umbrella stroller, Phil & Teds Me Too high chair and the Ergo Baby Carrier.

On a trip like this, it is important to alternate high activity with low activity especially when you are in the early stages of getting to know your baby. If it takes a regular tourist a week to visit a city, then consider doubling or tripling your time there when you have a baby. We mostly stayed in the first few days in a new city to help Jackson adjust to the new environment, and just get the lay of the land including scouting all the supermarkets and drugstores. Then we’d slowly work through the list of sites to see and sandwich these activities between days when we were just establishing Jackson’s nap routine. (Even on days that we went sightseeing, we had Jackson take his naps during the regularly scheduled times – by pushing him around in the stroller or carrying him in the Ergo Carrier until he fell asleep. Old town cobblestones were great for the stroller naps!)

We mostly stuck to our planned itinerary, but flexibility is key when you travel with a baby. We changed our dates often, depending on how much we wanted to explore or the level of comfort we were experiencing with Jackson. For instance, we skipped the glaciers in New Zealand and opted for a longer stay in Queenstown instead in order to avoid an eight hour bus ride and more time just relaxing in the comforts of our home. One thing that really helped was our around the world ticket (most airlines offer this). We ultimately bought our ticket from the One World alliance because they had a flat fee ticket that was not based on miles flown but based on number of destinations. This seemed to offer more flexibility, but you might also want to choose a different alliance (e.g. Star Alliance) based on which countries you want to visit and which airlines are in their alliance. Also, you only pay a relatively small change fee for changes in destinations (and no fee for date changes). We booked most of our apartments/hotels only a week or two in advance, sometimes even a day in advance. We found that there will always be availabilities and we usually found them on the internet on sites like vrbo.com and wotif.com. Googling “ vacation rentals” usually found decent sites for any given location.

Another point on flexibility – you may have to be content with taking in the local culture from the streets, instead of from the historical sites. Sometimes the baby just won’t cooperate. The Prague Castle was one of those places – the three hours we had would not have been long enough to see the whole thing, so we just opted for the highlights. It is much better to sightsee with a happy baby than to try to conquer everything while consoling a crying baby at the same time.

As a tourist, a person has very little time to understand the cultural norms and may walk away feeling very frustrated by some foreign experiences. But over time as you learn about the culture, you begin to develop respect and understanding for each other’s way of life. We know this, but we were only beginning to understand this during the course of our trip. With all the packing and unpacking that we were doing on the trip in addition to raising a rambunctious one year old at the tail end of our journey, we rarely had time to step back and let it all sink in. Since Jackson won’t remember a thing from this trip, we kept a blog for him to one day relive the experiences (http://world.jhong.org) and another blog to document his growth throughout the year in various locations (http://www.roamingjackson.com). We hope he won’t hate us for the second blog…

By the end of our journey, we were able to pack up everything in less than 30 minutes and had the routine down pat on how to walk and carry everything. James would tow my suitcase and the travel crib while carrying his pack. I would carry the laptop/diaper bag on my back while Jackson was strapped to my front, and also tow the umbrella stroller. We got around airports, metros and city streets like a well oiled machine. It is hard to believe that we lived out of our suitcases for so long, but we also learned how little you actually need to live happily.

“Go, see the world. You will never regret it.” (The Namesake)