You can look, but don't touch!

I know I've mentioned this in another post, but when you are travelling with twins there is a good chance that you will become an attraction yourself.  Everyone loves twins, even back at home we get stopped by people who are twins, have twins, want twins, know twins, hell, even people who just happened to have seen a set of twins sometime in their life.   Just like back home, be prepared to get stopped and talked to, you won't know a word of what's being said, so smile and nod, or learn how to say the equivalent of Sprechen sie English? everywhere you go.  One thing you might find while travelling with twins is that you are now someone's photo op.  We had people ask to take pictures of us, just stop on the street, or even in a couple instances try to pose with us.  Just an observation here...most of the picture takers were fellow tourists, from somewhere in Asia.  We had been told by a Chinese friend of ours that Twin Boys were very good luck in China, so we weren't really surprised by the extra attention.  Luckily pretty much everyone followed the "You can look, but don't touch!" rule.

Baby A&B Napping on a swelteringly hot day...To you parents of singletons, your baby is cute, but nothing compared to twins, sorry! :)

Planes, Trains, and/or Automobiles

When you're travelling around with 2 infants getting from point A to point B can become way more than just an after thought.  The logistics of hauling two kids and weeks worth of gear between two places can be a pretty daunting task.  Every mode of transportation is going to have it's drawbacks.  In our 4 weeks in Germany and Hungary we did them all, we rented a car throughout Germany, took the train from Munich to Budapest (via a night in Vienna), rented another car in Hungary and then flew from Budapest back to Munich.  Along the way we ran into some road blocks, thought we lost our stroller, and dealt with all varieties of screaming babies.

We knew we were going to be renting a car to drive around Germany so we lugged our car-seats with us onto the plane.  That's drawback #1 for renting and driving, even with our seats being able to attach to the stroller we still had to lug the seats and attachments around with us.  Attaching the seats to the stroller also makes the stroller (ours at least) heavier and wider.  We would have been much happier not having to deal with the car seats all trip long.  Drawback #2, see "Kicking Baby to the Curb." Drawback #3 is having to deal with parking, whether it's finding a spot, figuring out what actually is a spot, or paying to keep you spot, it's a pain in the ass if you will be in any major cities, or even small old cities with narrow streets for that matter.  But with the bad comes the good; you're free to do things on your own schedule, no rushing to get to the train station, or finding out that your train is delayed, just get in and go!  Travelling by car opens up certain routes and small places you may not get to by train, at least not very easily.  Since this is specifically regarding travel in Germany(and Hungary) how can you go there and NOT drive on the Autobahn? You'd have to be crazy to skip it, its part of the experience cruising along at 160km/h and being passed like you were standing still.

We took a short 1 hour flight from Budapest back to Munich, and I must say it was nice to have the trip done in an hour, but when you add in the half hour taxi, the two hour early arrival, the extra hour I always pad into any flight because I have an irrational fear of missing a flight, the delays, waiting for your baggage, then getting back into the City again, you've turned your nice quick 1 hr flight into an all day affair.  So hey, your 1 hr flight is really 6 hrs door to door, that's still better than 9 hours on a train!  In the end dealing with security and check-in, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, then the mad rush to board, the dread of how long you're going to be stuck on the tarmac waiting while your precious little ones' melt down clocks are tick, tick, ticking away just doesn't seem worth it for an hour flight.  Maybe that's just us, but the pain in the ass to actual travel time ratio is too high for most situations where your flight is less than an hour,

Our other "long haul" was the train from Munich to Budapest, not to be confused with the "short haul" flight  the other way from Budapest to Munich.  Sure 6 hours of travel for less than an hour of actual travel on a plane seems like a nightmare, but so does a comparable 9 hour train ride.  It wasn't that we couldn't survive that amount of time on the train, we just didn't want to.  We opted instead to stop for a little layover mid-way through the journey.  We got off the train in Vienna in the early afternoon, checked into a hotel for the night, and left the next morning to continue our journey into Budapest.   Looking back on our two journeys in opposite directions they were really both lose-lose.  The plane was a pain in the ass, the train was long, stopping over for a night was great....until we had to pack up and leave immediately after we got there.  I think that distance of the trip just isn't in the sweet spot time/distance wise, if we had a couple more days to spare, the stop in Vienna would have been great...for real.

For shorter journeys though, the train is definitely the way to go, it's convenient, and way more relaxing.  Even at our boys' age, they like to look out the window and watch the scenery go by, as did we.  One of the great benefits, at least in Germany/Hungary, was that when booking our two adult seats, the kids seats were included for free(small booking fee in Hungary).   If we only had two seats it would have probably been miserable, but with the two seats for the babies, we had room to throw car-seats, diaper bags, water bottles, and any miscellaneous crap you didn't want to deal with at the moment.  Beware though, if you are bringing a larger stroller, like our Mountain Buggy Duet, you will be hard pressed to find a good solution for storing it, especially if there is no luggage car.  When you are shuttling bags back and forth between your seat(that someone has already claimed to be their own) and lugging car seats down tiny aisles the last thing you want to have to do is lug a stroller back and forth trying to find somewhere to put it. On our first train we barely managed to squeeze it onto a luggage rack...after taking off the wheels and car seat attachments.  After that headache I dreaded having to deal with it on the next ride we took, but it all ended up working out in the end despite some hiccups along the way.

(Baby A enjoying his first train ride)

Kicking the baby to the curb.

Our boys aren't the car lovers that most people think babies are, they do not fall asleep after driving around the block, in fact, they do the opposite and scream for hours on end.  When we could, we would try to leave around nap-time so that we avoided as much screaming as possible, this isn't always a feasible task though.  The worst example of this happened as we were driving into Budapest, Baby B surprisingly fell asleep pretty quickly on our drive in, which was about a 45 minute drive from where we were.  However, he decided to wake up screaming a half hour later, then I took a wrong turn, then I got caught on a major street needing to make a left hand turn with no possible place to do it.  Eventually through all the screaming, my teeth grinding, my hands sore from choking the life out of the steering wheel, we arrived....almost.  Of course there was nowhere to park, after a half circle of the block, almost turning the wrong way down a one-way street the frustration got the best of me and I kicked my wife and Baby-B onto the curb!  In relative silence Baby-A and I cruised around for a few minutes and found a parking spot not too far of a walk away.  We loaded up into the stroller, grabbed as much stuff as we could and headed off to find Mom and Baby-B.  Apparently Baby-B stopped screaming the second after getting out of the car seat and was happy as a clam. Moral of the story, don't hesitate to kick your wife and baby out of the car, it can only end up for the best!

Proud Papa - First Stamps

After our amazingly easy flight into Germany our boys got something most Americans can't even get at the moment, no matter how much they want to....a passport stamp!  At a time when only something like 35% of Americans have a valid passport and even then only a fraction of them are actually using their passports annually(~5% of American depending on your methodology), our boys have already received their first stamps!  This is a trend I hope we can continue for years to come, long after their baby picture passports expire in 5 years.

That's enough gloating for one post, I'll try to be a less snobby self-righteous prick next time . :)

Travelling with Twins, Where to Stay? Hotels or Apartments

Hotels or Apartments, that is the question:   People would ask us before our trip how we were going to stay in a hotel room with our twins, as if it was the only option.  If you need someone to come in a make your bed and fluff your pillow everyday, you should probably stick to a hotel....if only it was that simple.  For us hotels can offer more than just some housekeeping, but apartments still give us the best bang for our buck.  Even with the boys sleeping in one crib and not needing much space to move around, we find even the more spacious hotel rooms don't quite have the space needed.  Even a studio apartment we booked through AirBNB during our Germany/Hungary trip provided much more space than a hotel, plus we had a kitchen and a washing machine.

There are some things though that hotels could provide that made us happy we opted to stay some of our nights in one.  A bed that isn't two twins pushed together is probably one of our biggest reasons to go for a hotel over an apartment.  After spending weeks sleeping on sub(american)-standard beds, a night on a good hotel bed felt a tad bit like heaven.  Hotels can give you an options for a much needed splurge, it is vacation after all. We stayed on the Regency Club Level room at a Hyatt in Germany and took full advantage of the breakfast and evening cocktail "hour," with snacks and free drinks.  Pools also make a hotel a worth option at some point, it's just nice to be able to go and have a dip in beautiful, heated hotel pool, the boys especially enjoyed those benefits.  Lastly one thing that we especially missed at times in our apartments this trip was some nice high powered, bone chilling, air conditioning.  Those Europeans and their energy efficiency sure are missing out when it comes to the A/C.  There are other small things like ease of booking/cancelling, easier check-ins, nice big lifts, and maybe a feeling of added security(sometimes),

Apartments though will be our main choice for accommodations.  It really just comes down to the extra space available and we can find somewhere with a washing machine. Especially next year when the boys are moving around and we have two cribs to set up, an average size hotel room just isn't going to cut it.  Sure you can get your clothes washed at a hotel, but for a price, knowing we have a washing machine where we are staying allows us to cut way down on the amount of clothes we are bringing, which is a HUGE plus. We used AirBNB for the first time this trip, and we are hooked.  It makes the booking process smooth, you get a good sense of what you're getting through reviews, and we found all of our hosts to be really accommodating and super easy to work with.  Two of our hosts even had cribs set up and some baby toys for us when we arrived, the whole AirBNB thing was amazing, I can't imagine using something else to book an apartment.  Places like Homeaway/VRBO seem to be such a hassle and booking upon arrival is just not an option for us anymore.  Our Italy trip is probably going to be mostly setup in advance and booked through AirBNB, but we'll probably also sneak in a couple hotel nights, just to lay on a huge king bed :)

If you click the AirBNB link to sign up you'll get $25 off your first stay(full disclosure: I would get a $25 referral after your stay)

Follow-Up: Booking before Babies

After all the dust has settled I guess it's time to put up a quick follow-up to how the whole booking before babies work around went.  All in all booking an extra-seat for an unborn infant was a great idea and it more or less went smoothly at the airport and in the air.  

If you'll be travelling close to your due date, or if you're like us and used miles and need to take advantage of availability while you can, booking an extra seat for an unborn infant may be the only way to actually get a seat.  There were a couple drawbacks to booking the extra seat though. It cost a little more, we had to pay the co-pay on the extra seat, as well as the lap-infant fare, which amounted to about $100.  The other and more annoying drawback was that we officially had two lap infants.  While in actuality we only had one, they were both booked as lap infants, and the airlines system could only see us as passengers with lap infants, the empty "extra seat" apparently counted as if someone was there .  Due to the amount of oxygen masks in each row airlines limit the number of lap infants that can be in any given row at a time.  So if the plane is 3/4/3, like the 747 we flew to Frankfurt the system would not allow us to be put into a row together next to a window, because as far as it was concerned we were 3 people and two lap infants and there are only 4 oxygen masks.  Luckily for us the flight to FRA was a 2/3rds full and the gate agent just blocked out a whole middle row in front of the bulkhead for us.  On the way back was another story, our connecting flight in Chicago was nearly full, and we barely had any connection time.  Due to the whole two lap infant thing they were unable to get us seats next to each other.  Luckily other passengers on the plane were fairly understanding to our plight and agreed to swap seats to allow us to all fit together, it probably helped that they didn't mind getting away from the possibility of 4 hours of screaming.  

If you are set on not travelling with a lap infant(or two) and you must book your tickets before they're born then booking "extra seats" is a no brainer and well worth a little bit of a headache and a few extra bucks.

First time Flying with Twins

After all the dread of babies screaming for hours, drinks being thrown at us,and flights being diverted,  we boarded our first flight with the boys.  The flight from SFO to FRA clocked in at about 10.5hrs of flight time, and it couldn't have possibly been a smoother time in the air.  For all of our worry and preparation we were rewarded with essentially no screaming, barely any crying, no blowouts, no projectile vomiting.  It really couldn't have gone better, which also scared us, we figured our good fortune would have to catch up with us at some point.

If you've found this post ,you're probably like us, looking forward to going somewhere with your babies, but scared shitless about the journey to come.  There is a wealth of info from parents regarding flying with babies  and toddlers of all ages.  For all the worry that leads up to the event the journey will probably be pretty anticlimactic...as long as you're prepared for most of what could happen.  We had bottles and boobs for takeoff and landing, front-packs for the restless minutes before naptime, extra clothes and plastic bags for blowouts.  For us the key was to be prepared for what could happen and just run with it, not much else you can do at 35,000 feet once you are there.  You may read about people scheduling their flights for naptimes, and bending over backwards to try to force your little ones into the same routines, but for us that seems pointless, after all, this is about BREAKING your routine.  Once you've left for the airport, you're at the mercy of the travel gods, an unexpected delay, a long line at security, a wait on the tarmac, whatever, and your plan to keep your routine will crumble in no time, so why force it?  

The flight home from Munich proved to be nearly as uneventful as the flight there.  But we were dealt a small dose of reality when "Baby A" decided to provided us with the biggest, messiest, smelliest deuce he's ever taken, one that had been brewing inside him for 10 days!  In the end it was a blip on an otherwise normal flight, poopy clothes thrown into a plastic bag, 30 wipes into the trash, tons of screaming and  5 minutes later we were good to go.  If the worst that happens is screaming and pooping, that's pretty much the same as any other day, why let that hold you back!  You may even get rewarded with a compliment from a nearby passenger about how good your little guys were. :)

For our flights we booked one seat to be able to put a car seat on the plane.  It was nice at times, and definitely made the flight easier, but I think we would have gotten by just fine without, especial on the flight over which was only 2/3rds full, and we had a whole bulkhead row to ourselves.  If we had it to do again I'd save the miles/money and take a chance that we'd be able to find an empty seat to be able to stretch out.

(Baby B chillaxing in the carseat on the plane.)

Product Review: Phil and Teds Traveller

We looked at a lot of options for travel cribs / cots / bassinets , in reality nothing really seemed to fit what we were REALLY looking for, which would be light, compact, fit nicely in a backpack.  It seemed like they were either big and bulky or small but oblong.   We ended up getting the Phil & Teds Traveler, Travel Crib,while it is still bulkier than we would like, we found it to be usable especially since at 3-4 months both of the boys can fit without really disturbing the other.

The crib is pretty light, coming in around 7lbs, it's reasonably compact, and doesn't have a funky shape.  The frame seems sturdy enough that it will last to their toddler years as well.  The fitted sheet that comes with it to go over the therma-rest is softer than any sheets we have for our own bed, so I think they're plenty cozy sleeping on it.  We found that setting up the crib was extremely easy, 8 pieces to snap together for the frame, a couple zippers, put some air in the therma-rest and you are done.  We had read some negative reviews on the setup before we bought it, so we were a little worried at first, but putting it together the first time was a breeze.  The take-down however can be a little bit of a pain in the ass.  The pieces that snap together for the rails are impossible to depress enough to disconnect the two sections without using some sort of object to push them in.  Once you take the pieces apart a few times, you'll realize what works and what doesn't(your fingers) and it won't be a problem.

All in all it's a great product that fit packed in our luggage and didn't require any real extra hauling around, just a slightly bulging backpack!  Now that we can't fit both boys in a single crib we may have to break the bank a bit to buy another one, but at least we won't be breaking our backs!

1st Trip - Lessons Learned, Looking to the Future

We made it through all the doom and gloom, nay-saying, and sarcastic "good lucks!"  Our first trip with our boys was a success, it wasn't exactly the same as what we were used to, but it went off without a hitch.  Sure, we didn't stay out late and drink our asses off, maybe we never ate dinner past 6:00, but we didn't feel hindered by our new additions and enjoyed (almost) every minute of it.  It went so well that two weeks in we booked our flights for next year!  That's going to be a whole 'nother story, hopefully we won't have any early walkers to contend with.  Here's some things we figured out, or were reinforced, from our first trip with the boys.

Lessons Learned:
#1 - It ain't that bad! -  Quit worrying about what could happen and just get out there and do it.
#2 - Pack Light -   We tried our damnedest to pack as many essentials as we could without being crushed under the weight of our packs. Even still, pushing a stroller with two carseat attached, carrying a 35lb pack is daunting, we only had to do it fully loaded a few times but I couldn't imagine bringing more stuff.  Do yourself a favor and if you're not sure you'll need it, don't bring it!
#3 - Stay Hands Free - This one may be a bit more of a personal preference but, for us, backpacks were a must.  We'd always brought them on our travels anyways but I couldn't imagine not being able to have both hands free.  If you're pulling a piece of luggage and trying to push a stroller simultaneously, you're going to be miserable.  Even with carrying 35lbs on your back it's much easier to maneuver, tend to the baby, open doors, go up curbs, whatever.
#4 - Be flexible -   Don't saddle yourself down with MUST-DOs.  You're not going to be able to do it all, you'll get slowed down when you're rushing, you'll get distracted when trying to concentrate, and you'll just get frustrated if you are locked into having to do things a certain way or at a certain time.  Slow it down, don't lock yourself into a timetable, just go with the flow and do what you can do, you can always come back!
#5 - Everyone loves twins! -  Not much of a lesson learned, but we were surprised by how much of a spectacle we became at times.  People would stop and talk, often in a language we didn't understand, they'd take pictures of them(a little weird), want to pick them up, make a distinctly European ticking sound with their mouths(kinda like what you might do to get a horse to move), it was a bit crazy at times.
#6 - Accept some help - After assessing the situation of course, at restaurants, hotels, airports people love to help by holding a baby if it looks like you might be struggling.  Accept their offer, free yourself up for a quick second, and maybe take advantage of it for a few more seconds to stretch or do what ever for that brief baby-less moment.
#7 - Learn to Love the Ergo - Or whatever your carrier/front-pack of choice is.  Our boys aren't too fond of the stroller, at least for sleeping.  It's 100X easier for them to sleep in the Ergo than the stroller, and they sleep for longer, no worrying about keeping the stroller moving if you stop.  We found that if it's about nap-time and we wanted to do any museums or anything like that,  it is much easier to put them in the front packs and walk around and have them fall, and stay, asleep.