This week’s climbing column is devoted to travelling with a baby.
Whether you have a child or not, everyone has a mental image of travelling with or near an infant. It could be sitting on a plane about to take off and a lone child is howling in the bowels of economy class despite the flurry of shushes coming from the parent. It could be a parent climbing from front to back seats in a small car while a partner pilots said car down the jam-packed I5 just south of Tacoma.
You could be loading your precious bundle into a kid carrier backpack, about to set off on a slow tour of the West Coast Trail, with a willing partner crippled behind, spine bowed under the weight of a monstrous pack. Whatever your place in this drama, it’s an intimidating journey to consider.
As a new parent and ardent climber, travel, adventure and new experiences are very important to me. It provides me with a chance to dive deep into something, somewhere new without any moorings of familiarity with which to keep hold. Scary? Yes. Rewarding? I believe so.
I’m writing this piece while sitting on the concrete outside the tourism office on a Sunday morning in Correns, France. This tiny rural town is in the Provence region in the south of France. It’s 10:30 a.m. and I’ve been banished from our tiny rented house by my partner in order to get some quieter time with our young daughter, a fiery 16-month-old. I drank a full cup of espresso, forwent the shower for yet another morning and beetled out of the house.
We came here to climb on the soaring golden walls of French limestone, some of the best rock climbing the world has on offer. It started with a flight from YVR to Amsterdam where they thankfully gave us bulkhead seats for the extra room and bassinet. She barely slept a wink, instead running from cockpit to tail rudder for hours, laughing and grabbing people’s knees as she flew by. Awkward.
From Amsterdam we flew to Nice, all the while our daughter going squirrelly from the lack of rest and strange airplane food. She ate well of breakfast on this flight, especially the yogurt, which then came back up and splashed all over Mum and me as we made out turbulent descent.
We arrived and got all our baggage. All, that is, except our checked car seat we just bought and brought all the way from Canada. No worries, the seat insured, we rented another from the car rental agency and took off in our diesel Renault Coup.
We arrived at our rental house after dark, because there are no addresses used in small French villages. The old, old couple who rented us the house had to come and lead us to the place in their ancient car, complete with driving the wrong way up many, many streets. In retrospect, we should have taken the advice given us by a very, very inebriated French gentleman at a bar while we hunted for the house. His slurred directions turned out to be exact.
We’ve now been at the house for three days and the climbing, at a cliff named Chateauvert, is incredible. The car sits a three minute walk away beside a babbling stream. Families abound at the cliff, all climbing and laughing. Our daughter has gone on sleep strike, but is loving getting into imminent danger at the cliff each day.
Even with the increasing sleep deprivation, the tempers and the tears, our little girl wakes each morning with a smile and leaps out of bed, intent on getting outside to explore the strange new land in which she’s found herself. We follow suit. I’m unsure how little sleep I can continue running on and how much espresso is healthy to drink, but rest assured, if that smile continues each morning, then this little adventure was the right choice for us. Stay tuned for our next instalment two weeks from now.
