Travel with twins

We skipped town for most of August and September because of renovations on our apartment. We have spent most of that time visiting my family in Queensland – staying a week at my cousin’s place in Brisbane, 10 days at her family’s holiday house in Noosa and a week apiece with two different aunts near Maleny in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. We head back to Sydney next week.

This is the first time we have embarked on a major trip since the twins were born. We tested the waters in July with a weekend in Newcastle but four or five weeks away from home is quite a different affair. It has gone really well but it’s interesting that the things I thought would be challenging were relatively straightforward, while other things have proven to be trickier than expected.

I was quite concerned about the flights. It’s only about an hour and a half from Sydney to Brisbane and Australian domestic flights tend to run on time so I knew it wouldn’t be too horrendous. But I was concerned about how the twins would cope with the flights as I’ve heard that babies can find pressure changes very painful for their ears, leading to screaming fits especially during takeoff and landing. I would never drug my children because it’s not considered 100% safe so I was a little nervous about how it would all work out.

In the end that wasn’t the hard part at all. My daughter fell asleep on my lap before take-off and stayed asleep for the next hour. A quarter hour before landing she woke up and smiled and gurgled until we started to descend. There were then a few minor grizzles as the plane lost altitude but she sucked on the dummy and kept it together. My husband and son were a few rows up (you can’t have two lap babies in the same row because of the availability of oxygen masks) and they had a similar experience.

The biggest challenge has been actually managing all our stuff. My husband took the bags – a big red suitcase, a backpack, a cabin bag and one car seat – to the airport in a cab. Meanwhile, I took the twins in the double pram on the bus and train. Unfortunately I couldn’t gate-check the pram but instead had to check it in at oversize baggage before going through security. Qantas lent me two strollers for each baby and, since my husband had already gone through to the gate, they also found a spare staff person to push one of the prams. Thank goodness they had someone who had the time to help me!

We weren’t even fully laden at this point, since one of my cousins lent us a travel cot and another car seat once we got to Brisbane. But we still had far too much stuff. Another cousin lent us her car and it’s a decent-sized station wagon with a storage pod on the top but it’s still packed tight every time we move location. One of the suitcases is really too big for the car and I’m also finding that I’ve packed clothing for both myself and the twins that we haven’t even worn. I’ve never paid much attention to posts written by other travel bloggers about travel gear or packing tips, instead preferring to read narrative or inspirational posts. But now that I’m a mother the strategy of travel has suddenly become relevant to me. I need to get good at it by June next year when we are planning to go to Europe for a wedding. It’s a whole new phase of travel!

I’m also relieved that we are not moving around too much as it takes us ages to pack the car up and get going, in between feeding the babies and putting them down for naps. The first time – leaving Brisbane to drive to Noosa an hour and a half away – it took us from 7am to 3pm to clean the house and get on the road. We are getting better at it though. I think our strategy for Europe will involve holiday rental properties rather than hotels and rental cars rather than flights, where possible.

The twins – six months old when we left Sydney and seven months old as of yesterday – are thriving and continuing to attract attention wherever they go. The photo shows the twins sitting in their Qantas strollers at the gate at Sydney Airport with two Chinese tourists cooing over them and posing with them for snapshots. They didn’t speak English and didn’t ask for permission but I let them go ahead. I get tourists wanting to take photos of the twins quite often and it seems like karmic payback for all the photos of cute kids I’ve taken all over the world, from Uganda to Indonesia.

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