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Parenting The Chronically Ill: Adventure and Travel
Travel is something my daughter and I both love. We yearn for adventure, we yearn to get away and experience new places and see new things. I have instilled a sense of wanderlust in to her. We spend a year planning our next getaway as a distraction from treatments and as a motivation to come out of it on the other side. We do not need more things, time isn’t guaranteed, so our reward system is adventures. Sometimes it is a small adventure to play Laser Tag, or to play Putt Putt, sometimes it is a bigger adventure like a trip. The thing with travel, that isn’t local, is it is an ordeal. Thankfully, she doesn’t see that, so we roll with it, but for me as the parent, the planning is a massive component.
If you’ve read my past articles you know Bit has 13 food allergies, which means eating out is next to impossible. So lodging that has a full kitchen has to be factored in to all travel that is not a cruise ship (we’ll get to those!). Our first thing we look at though is the location we want to go to, do they require any vaccines, how close are they to a major medical center, will there be a language barrier? Due to those things our travel has been within the US mostly, and then to London, and on Caribbean cruises, though this year we are venturing to Italy and Greece.
