Women Who Travel Podcast: Listeners on the Magic and Mishaps of Traveling With Kids

So we had been watching. And then as soon as the moment that totality begins, you see something called a diamond ring right when the moon is covering the sun and this flash of light kind of comes out of it. And my older son, I had told him what was going to happen, and when he saw it, he just yelled out, “It’s the diamond ring,” and then we all took our glasses off and we had I think about four minutes of totality, and it was incredible. And it was just as I remembered, but also even better than I had remembered, and I was just thrilled that I got to have my kids there to see it with me this time.

LA: After the break, a listener takes her kids to Japan for the first time. Welcome back to Women Who Travel. Noreen Khan lives in Coronado, California with her husband and two kids, a fifteen-year-old and a ten-year-old.

Noreen Khan: This December, we were able to enjoy a trip to Japan, and this trip was really initiated by the kids for the first time. For a while, they’ve really been saying that they want to go to Japan. Both kids are huge fans of Pokemon, which are playing cards, also a cartoon that they both have been watching and playing since they were about five years old.

LA: So even though Noreen wasn’t so sure about going to Japan in the cold season, she’s much more of a beach vacationer, she was ultimately outnumbered and her kids were excited.

NK: And we booked our tickets about two weeks before we were actually supposed to go despite talking about it for quite a while. So we got on the plane with a list of to-do’s, and as we got closer to take off, we realized that so many places required reservations, and there was so many things to do and so many places to go that we were like, “Let’s just play it by ear. We’re going to a new place. We’ll just have fun.” Honestly, had a very, very low bar as to how the experience was going to be due to the lack of planning, knowing that it was being cold weather.

LA: On the flight, to Noreen’s surprise, her kids started to show their homework. Her daughter had actually gone to the local library and pulled out travel guides, while her son had gone down YouTube rabbit holes, finding places he wanted to explore and things that he wanted to eat during the trip.

NK: So as we had this long flight, all we really had to do was kind of organize what we could do each day. So I was really thrilled that my kids for the first time could really take the lead on planning a family vacation. My fifteen-year-old is very quiet, very reserved, and so the culture of Japan really resonated well with his personality. And so we would be going to eat out. Restaurant is very quiet, and I would hear him kind of somehow motion to the waiter and had an exchange of the waiter, and the waiter comes back with a fork, and I was, “What did you do? How did you get the fork?”