I just returned from a two-week trip to London with my kids. It was wonderful and exhausting and funny and hard and all the other things traveling with kids can be.
We didn’t do too many touristy things, because wow do I not want to drag two five-year-olds through a dozen museums. I mean, I did take them to the British Museum and give them a brief lecture about the Parthenon marbles and how they belong in Greece, because of course I did. But that was the only museum I subjected them to.
Kids are always tourists while traveling, in a sense. In his landmark article “Herodotus the Tourist,” James Redfield writes:
The tourist makes no attempt to fit in; he rather accepts a specific social role: that of foreigner. In so doing he shows himself comfortable with his own culture, which is strong enough to sustain him even in his temporary position as an outsider. I am at home elsewhere, he says; therefore you will accept the fact that I am different, as I enjoy the fact that you are different. The greater the difference, the more the journey is worth the trip and the more worth collecting are the images, memories, and souvenirs that the tourist takes home with him.
The tourist, in fact, travels in order to be a foreigner, which is to say, he travels in order to come home. He discovers his own culture by taking it with him to places where it is out of place, discovers its specific contours by taking it to places where it does not fit.
This definitely describes how my kids travel: they’re mostly interested in how things are the same and different from life back home. Fries are now “chips” and chips are now “crisps”? Mind = blown.
One of the funniest moments for me was when I told one of the five-year-olds that we needed to bring the laundry line inside because it was going to rain. He looked at me with an almost comical expression of horrified surprise and said, “In the summer?!?” Because he’s lived in Palo Alto his whole life, where that just doesn’t happen.
When people from, say, New York or Chicago visit me in Palo Alto and experience the perpetual sunny-and-78-degree weather, they often say, “I’d miss the seasons if I lived here.” I get it, I do. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, where there were real seasons. I lived to see the forsythia burst into odorless yellow bloom in early spring. In the fall my family would sometimes head up to New England and get fresh apple cider donuts. I know the joy of change.
But I also know the joy of never needing to own a winter coat, or shovel feet of snow out of your driveway, or having the unraked leaves in your lawn get moldy. I know the joy of having a Meyer lemon tree in my yard and seeing tiny nests with even tinier hummingbird chicks. Seasons aren’t so great.
Palo Alto does have seasons, but they’re not of the usual spring-summer-fall-winter kind. There’s a dry season, and a wet season, and in recent years the wet season is never wet enough. So when you’re inconvenienced by the rain — say, you have a young child and you’re cooped up indoors with nothing to do, and the siren song of screen time is calling — you feel like you can’t even really complain about the rain, because it would be churlish to do so when your state needs it so badly. So you sigh and say something like “Well, thank goodness we’re finally getting some rain!” before you give in and abdicate parenting to Bluey.
There are micro-seasons here, too. For a period at the end of dry season — how long that period is depends on how unlucky the West Coast has been — you get to experience fire season, when the sky is gray with smoke, the sun burns orange, and the air quality forces you inside. Sometimes in a particularly bad fire season the sky will turn red.
Fire season is bad, but somehow less unsettling than caterpillar season, which usually happens in March, when the furry Tussock moth caterpillars descend on silken strings from oak trees. Walking face-first into one is a particularly upsetting experience, especially since the hairs on the caterpillars can cause stinging rashes. During one particularly bad caterpillar season, I remember walking down the street and seeing dozens of the threads drifting through the air, silhouetted against the cloudless sky. The caterpillars themselves march in creepy single file line and produce grayish, fuzzy cocoons that look like small balls of dryer lint.
Early September is tarantula mating season. That only really matters if you’re planning on walking on The Dish, a hiking trail owned by Stanford that takes you in a hilly three-mile loop around a giant satellite. You can see groundhogs and hawks there, and occasionally mountain lions. And, for a couple of weeks, horny tarantulas. Once, my partner was in town visiting me, and I suggested we walk on the Dish. I told him, “I think tarantula mating season is over,” and he said, “I’m going to have to get that in triplicate.”
But most of the time, Palo Alto is gorgeous — rarely too hot, never truly cold. The kind of place where you always need a pair of sunglasses but also maybe a hoodie. Once, in late August, in the Trader Joe’s near my house, I saw two large basins near the front entrance: one was full of watermelons, the other of pumpkins. That pretty much sums up how Palo Alto seasons work.
So that’s the true story of how I took my kids halfway around the world so they could eat some fries but call them chips and experience rain in July. And now we’re home, which I guess according to Redfield is the point of traveling in the first place.
Of course, after spending the entire trip complaining that the milk and water taste different in London, our kids started whining about missing London as soon as they got home. The Herodotean spirit lives on.