On making travel accessible for children

The train rolled through the Tuscan countryside en-route from Florence to Venice. Julia was hard at work planning our Venice itinerary, working from a series of articles I'd printed out about taking children to Venice. None of these articles were particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of Venice as a family vacation destination, but Julia seemed unwilling to let this dampen her own enthusiasm for the next leg of our trip.

"Venice may be a great town for kids to live in," Julia read aloud, "but it probably wouldn't be anyone's first choice as a tourist destination for the preschool through junior-high crowd. Hand a copy of Venicewalks or Venice: A Literary Companion to a child, and you're likely to hear, 'Mommy, why can't we go to Disney World?'" Scowling, she crossed these sentences out with a green marker and wrote "not true" in the margins of the page. "We don't need Disney," she told me proudly. "We're going to love Venice."

I smiled in agreement, trying not to look too smug as I sized up my 6 year old travel snob. "Obviously the kids described in those articles must not be the kind of experienced travelers that you are," I replied, to which Julia beamed in response. As she returned to her list making, I turned back to the window to drink in more of the most unbelievably gorgeous views I've ever seen. Evan, who had been following the conversation, also turned to follow my gaze.

"Hey," he shouted, his high pitched voice overcome with excitement, "I think the Little Einsteins have been here!"

Chalk one up for Disney after all.

(Just back, obviously, from a week long trip to Pisa, Florence and Venice... one of our best holidays to date. Photos and a trip report to follow soon!)