The Itinerary

The rule with itineraries when traveling with small children is one major activity a day. It is also a good idea when visiting family to have a general sense for what you want to do, with the flexibility to change the itinerary for anything that might come up, a sick kid, or torrential rain, or a parade…

You should also make an assessment of what your kids will tolerate. Both my boys are early risers, up at 6 am. They are best behaved before 3 pm. They will skip naps on weekends, and then crash hard. For example it was hard to get my 2 year old out of bed this morning. All of this you need to take into consideration.

So we know when visiting any site, it works best for us to get there when it opens. Since the boys nap in the afternoon, and car rides will put them to sleep, long car trips should be planned for afternoon.

You should also consider the time-change. Any time you have a time-change, jet lag lasts one day per hour… So my sweet little guys won’t be on a schedule until Day 3. Until that day we need to avoid large indoor crowds, like an aquarium, or museum, or we will set ourselves up for failure. At the same time, parks like the National Arboretum would be perfect.

All in all we will be in DC for six very full non-travel days. We plan to visit with three friends and their families, and see as many as four sites. So, you can see the one activity a day may be quite difficult to accomplish.

The target sites include a mix of indoor and outdoor, and if we can do most of them during the weekday that would be best.

US National Arboretum (Outdoor)

The National Zoo (Outdoor)

National Aquarium Baltimore (Indoor)

B&O Railroad Museum (Indoor)

Annapolis for a crab feast (Mixed Indoor)

We also wanted to go to the DC Trolley Museum (boy do our boys love trains), but since it is closed until late summer it came off the list.

We will continue to refine the itinerary (I’m geeky enough to add weather to the timeline – but that is a different blog post). The final Itinerary will be a thick document with everything from train schedules, to confirmation emails for hotels, babysitting services, directions to friends’ houses etc.

However, as I mentioned earlier, flexibility is key. So if something doesn’t work out, that is okay. The goal isn’t to see the most sites. The goal is to have fun.