You might think you know about jet lag. You may have traveled a lot, and you may feel you’ve got a handle on how you react to it and how best to combat it. But I submit that you have never seen anything like a baby with jet lag.
When you, on your own, have jet lag, you suffer through two or three upside-down days and nights, and eventually get back on your feet. But nothing in this world can compare to dragging yourself through your flight, faking it through a full day in Greece, and finally crashing in your hotel room . . . to spend the entire night dealing with a six-month-old who thinks it’s noon.
So be vigilant. Because when you have Baby Jet Lag, you can start to make some really, really weird decisions. We look back on some of our early adventures in Travel With Kids and can only shake our heads in bafflement at some of the choices we made.
For example.
When they find out that their map of the Spanish Hill Towns is years old and wildly inaccurate, an un-baby-jet-lagged couple would stop at one of the many tourist offices to buy a new map. But not us. No. We, for reasons still unfathomable, continued on, determined to use our ridiculously outdated (like, it was missing two major freeways) map for FOUR DAYS. And we continued to get hopelessly, mind-bogglingly lost, every time. For FOUR DAYS. Why? We
can’t tell you. Except that Baby Jet Lag was to blame.
. . . at least they’re usually happy on the beach. –Nerja, Spain 2007
So please, during your first few days abroad with little ones, schedule periodic check-ins. Maybe twice a day, review your choices for failures in logic. Because you can save yourself a lot of unnecessary drama by occasionally checking for obvious insanity.
Or, as Dwight Schrute would advise: Whenever you’re about to do something, ask yourself, “Would an idiot do that?” And if they would, do not do that thing.
I can offer no wiser counsel.