We’re traveling to Door County, WI in a week. It’ll be our first road trip with Clara, but we’re experienced with-kid travelers: my work as a travel and spa writer has kept us hopping through the Midwest and beyond, almost always with kids in tow. And along the way, I’ve come up with three rules for traveling with children:

The pool always wins.
When treated to a whirlwind extravaganza of cultural experiences and entertainment including science museums, aquariums, go-karts, laser tag, 3-D movies, multi-media historical presentations, and a live reenactment of an 1800s logging camp; a nine-year-old will declare, without hesitation, that the best part of the trip was the half-hour he spent swimming in the hotel pool. After burning 5,000 calories running the kids from one enriching activity to another only to be faced with “This is okay, but when do we SWIM?” I have been tempted to declare the whole lot of them ungrateful; but I have to acknowledge that their desires are just a lot more basic than mine. A five-year-old, it appears, will choose a splash in a cold pool to an educational experience any day.

Preschoolers don’t comprehend the concept of “vacation”.
When William was three, we went on a six-day whirlwind road trip that had us staying in a different hotel each night. By day four of our trip, he became obsessive about our itinerary: where we were going to be now, five minutes from now, ten minutes after that, and most importantly, where we were going to sleep that night. At one point he asked me where all his toys were. “They’re at our house,” I answered, confused. “But we don’t live there anymore!” he cried. Whoops! To me, it was perfectly clear that our hotel rooms were just a place to crash in between days of sight-seeing and activities; but apparently William thought we’d renounced all our possessions and turned into nomads. Lesson learned: the next time we traveled, I spent a lot more time prepping the younger ones ahead of time, reassuring them that we weren’t, in fact, going to be living in hotels for the rest of our lives.

Toddlers in restaurants are torture for everyone involved.
Fortunately, right now we don’t have any kids in the 1-2 1/2 year age range, and they’re all able to keep it together throughout a meal. But it’s a lot of work to keep four kids quiet and focused on their meals—reminding them to keep their hands off one another, to wipe hands and faces, to say please and thank-you, not to burp, not to chew with mouths open, not to grab food off of other people’s plates. If one of them were a toddler, it’d be like eating dinner with three kids and a poop-flinging monkey on speed. To be fair, I often get compliments on my kids’ good behavior in restaurants, so I’m sure a lot of my horror at eating out with them when they were in the cracker-crumbling stage is just my own mind exaggerating their antics. But one of the most stressful parts about traveling with young children is always the idea of many restaurant meals in plain view of the public.

Despite some hard lessons learned during each of our trips, we’ve always had a good time. After all, nothing builds togetherness like hours crammed together in the car, sharing hotel rooms, and trying our best to put a presentable public face on our table behavior.

That, of course, and splashing in the hotel pool. Turns out the kids are right: when all is said and done, simple pleasures really are the best.