There’s an adage passed down from parent to parent: The days are long but the years are short.
Personally, I’ve found this to be true. I look up at my toddler, playing perfectly independently, sitting down and coloring by themselves (!!!) and it’s like, wait, weren’t you just crawling? Wasn’t I just planning your nursery? Sometimes I still can’t believe how much time has passed in such a visible way.
Amanda Kellner Klein from Carry On, based in Southern California, knows this. I love her Substack, which is about travel but just as often has so many gems about the mental load and management of a family—applying your business brain (she’s a brand partnerships executive) to your domestic brain in a way that makes sense to me. Not in an over-optimize every moment, you only get 18 summers kinda way, but adding the right kind of structure that makes parenting feel easier.
Amanda Kellner Klein on Travel with Toddlers
You all already know I’m obsessed with planning, and so when I first saw Amanda’s “the years are short” spreadsheet, which she adapted from Kelsey Wharton, I immediately DM’d her to have her on here because that is 100% my love language. Her two daughters are 3.5 and 1, but she’s thinking long-term about what destinations make sense now, what make sense later, and what make sense to travel multi-generationally.
“When I came across Bill Perkins’ “time bucket” philosophy in Die With Zero, I felt a wash of relief. Finally, someone had articulated an approach to capturing all of one’s desired activities in life from a practical standpoint.
Instead of hacking away at one big bucket list, Perkins segments the years of our lives into dedicated windows, or time buckets, each with it’s own limitations and possibilities based on the realities of those ages. In the thirties and forties, time and money are more limited as we focus on work and child-rearing. Later in life, we may have copious time and money but more limited mobility.
Perkins’ message is that each experience belongs best in a specific season. Once I internalized this, the haze of concern around getting to do everything I want with my kids slowly began to clear. There would be time, it was just a matter of allocating the buckets appropriately.” – Amanda Kellner Klein
This makes SO much sense to me. Especially as someone that travels fairly frequently, thinking more concretely about upcoming milestones—like, omg, kindergarten in a few years!—makes me feel just a little less FOMO. Here’s how Amanda plans out her trips:1
Do you travel often? What’s your travel “style” before and after kids?
Before kids, I tried to see and do everything. In my early twenties I embraced solo travel–from volunteering in Peru to studying in Buenos Aires and Paris. In my mid-twenties, my now-husband and I grew increasingly adventurous as a foil to our corporate lives in New York City, camping in Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert, staying in a treehouse on a remote island in Nicaragua. Over time, visiting different places has become a means of better understanding myself.
After kids, I have embraced the art of slow(er) travel. Our best trips have been the ones where we can settle in and notice how others live, work, rest, and connect. This is the context I am always searching for, and the curiosity I hope to pass on to my daughters.
We have taken more than fifty flights with our kids. With our extended family living on the East Coast or abroad, and a near-insatiable appetite for travel on my part, we travel to visit people we love and to introduce our girls to different ways of living.
What’s your biggest piece of travel advice with babies?
The baby isn’t the problem, the amount of stuff is! A big shock after having my first baby was just how much more stuff we needed to travel with. My best advice is to find ways to minimize the sheer amount of stuff. Thoughtful packing lists, buying items on location, and renting or borrowing baby gear go a long way in improving the experience of traveling with babies.
So true. What about your toddler? Any good advice?
Plan one main activity per day. Too much more and the day becomes about logistics and managing everyone’s energy while jumping from one thing to another. Without an intentional plan for the day, we inevitably find our toddler whining from boredom and find ourselves feeling like aren’t getting the most out of the experiences we’ve traveled for.
Tell me about the “years are short” spreadsheet! Can you tell me about how you travel intentionally and what that looks like?
Traveling intentionally, for us, is not where to go, but when to go. Of course, any age person can visit any destination—but when considering limited time off and the expenses of travel, it has become critical to optimize based on our children’s ages.
While I may be craving a certain type of trip, I must consider whether it would result in the desired experience with kids at these specific ages. For example, when our toddler was newly mobile, major cities were exhausting. At that stage, we appreciated more manageable towns where she could wander unhurried.
Every stage is finite and every stage has its pros and cons. That’s why “The years are short” travel spreadsheet has been useful; it helps to zoom out and visualize the temporary nature of the years with our kids, so we can plan for the nuances that accompany each particular age.
While it may sound limiting to choose destinations based on the current age of the children, setting this boundary has actually provided the freedom of knowing I can do all of the trips I envision, it is just a matter of allocating the appropriate timing by age.
How you budget for travel in general?
We treat travel as a fixed line item in our annual budget, allocating a predetermined amount to the category for the year. We pool our travel budget for the whole family, including trips for all four of us, as well as individual travel for my husband and I. Then, we track our travel expenditures on a monthly basis to ensure we are spending within the budget.
The Chase Sapphire Reserve card has been key for earning points on everyday spending, which we then redeem on travel using Chase’s advantageous multiplier. We save a couple thousand dollars on travel each year with points.
Maintaining travel spending rules has also proven useful. For example, we always fly economy class, but we buy a seat for the baby (even though she’s <2) on long flights. We like to keep lodging under $500/night and we grocery shop on our trips (part of why Airbnbs are preferred over hotels–the kitchens!). We don’t spend much on premium dining at this stage, as it isn’t something we value with little kids.
Things don’t always go according to plan. Tell me about a time when you had to pivot.
Listening to my toddler scream “But I want to go to France!!!” at the top of her lungs as our bus pulled away without us. We had arrived at the bus station San Sebastián to take a day trip to Biarritz, only to be denied boarding because we did not bring a car seat for the baby.
In retrospect, it was entirely fair that they denied us; we had just planned to wear the baby in the carrier as we would on any city bus. We recovered by pivoting to a beach day and renting a car on a different day to drive to Biarritz. Initially, we wanted to avoid the logistics and expense of renting a car on this trip, but you simply cannot be twelve miles from the French border and not go!
In that moment, I cursed myself for overlooking a seemingly obvious logistical detail. Now, I would tell myself that getting our newly minted family of four from California to Spain was a feat in and of itself, and something was bound to go off plan. If anything, I now have a sense of confidence from figuring out such a curveball in real time on the trip.
The best destination to travel with toddlers is…
Mallorca was the first international trip we took with our daughter when she was 16 months, and the island still stands out as an incredible destination for families. There are so many beautiful, relaxed towns to explore, impressive mountains, stunning beaches and a great city in Palma, while the whole island is about an hour and a half drive from end to end. I still dream about moving there.
I would recommend staying in Port de Pollença or Port de Soller; both lively towns that sit alongside the sea, walkable to restaurants and beaches. The sea is calm around Mallorca, making it safe for young children who want to explore. Lunch at Hotel Corazon up in the Tramuntana mountains was a sublime experience, though I would not choose it for lodging with small kids, and we enjoyed the town of Soller (separate from Port de Soller) which has a running train that’s a big hit with the little ones.
Mallorca is an ideal mix of European city break and Mediterranean vacation. Go during shoulder season for great weather and fewer crowds. Spain itself is very child-friendly. So much so that we chose to return to San Sebastián after our younger daughter was born.
And the best place to stay…
Airbnb is nearly always the winner for us when comparing space and price versus hotels, but I have to mention the Octant Douro here. My parent travel jackpot is a hotel that welcomes and accommodates children without being overtly for kids. At the Octant Douro in northern Portugal, only about 5% of the guests were kids, the atmosphere was decidedly adult, but the accommodations for children were omnipresent.
The hotel is exceedingly chic, a modern feat of architecture built into the side of a hill overlooking the Douro River. The game room has a playroom section, the terrace pool is for families, and meals at the restaurants include coloring pages. Turndown service was a balloon and a teddy bear. The crib they provided came with a branded lovey and there was even a kid-sized robe hanging in the bathroom. We paid 550€/night, well worth it to experience this level of attention to our family for a couple of nights.
As a bonus, the Octant Douro is only a forty five minute drive outside of Porto, making it a much more digestible add-on with kids. Most Douro Valley hotels are further inland down the river and therefore require longer drives.
The toddler travel gear Amanda doesn’t leave home without…
I am a Slumberpod evangelist; we used it with our older daughter from four months until she was about two and a half, and now it’s the baby’s travel sleep space. The Slumberpod makes room sharing doable, especially on the occasions that all four of us share one room.
A random product I have been obsessed with for 3+ years is this Freestyle diaper changing set. It has been on as many flights as my kids have. It is compact for travel, washable and stores all of the necessary items for tight airplane bathroom diaper changes.
The Yoto Mini has also become a critical item. Our toddler doesn’t nap anymore, and we don’t travel with screens for her (though I am absolutely thrilled for her to watch hours of movies on an in-flight TV), so the Yoto grants us some quiet time. It takes up minimal space and we pair it with cute headband headphones that have both wire and Bluetooth options.
What’s your best travel memory with your kids so far?
The full circle moment of nursing my baby on a bench in Central Park, New York City while my toddler joined an impromptu dance party nearby. More than a decade ago, I would take the subway uptown to the park after class at NYU. Traversing the same area, having flown across the country with my kids and having visited with our East Coast family and friends, felt like coming home and experiencing a new place all at once. 🗽
Thank you so much, Amanda! When I first read Amanda’s post I sat down and made a spreadsheet for myself, with some destinations I already had in mind (like Costa Rica around age 7/8, or whenever kids are old enough to go ziplining; and Switzerland, hopefully soon, for my own full circle moment from study abroad). This is making me want to think about the next few years, especially as we branch out from “plop”-style vacations.
Thanks for being here.
Is it cliche to say the days are long but the years are short? Absolutely, and yet, there’s such a grain of truth in it. It resonates so much for me, especially from the baby year in which every day was a marathon to get to bedtime, which of course, had multiple wake-ups and also felt like forever…and now that seems like it was both yesterday and a long time ago.
For me, the only way to combat the “days are long” part is to make each day a little bit of an adventure. When we’re outside, finally, even if it takes f o r e v e r to hike a mile, it’s the good kind of forever. We’re stopping to throw sticks into the river and rush to the other side of the bridge. We’re smelling flowers and yelling into tree holes. We’re snacking on top of the biggest rock we can find and counting the spots of lichen.
To yoo-hoo, sky-blue, spring-sing days,
Kayla
If you liked this post, please consider supporting my work. I’m just a mom in the thick of the toddler years trying to create core memories for our whole family while minimizing meltdowns—I sincerely hope this helps you do the same.
This post was originally published on Travel with Toddlers. Subscribe for more real-talk travel advice, toddler-friendly itineraries, and tried-and-true gear recommendations.
