Traveling With Kids Raises Booster Seat Questions
3/13/08
Managing Car-Seat Safety Away From Home
In a completely spontaneous move that was utterly out of character for me, I recently jumped on a plane with my two children for a quick weekend jaunt to the beach. As a single parent traveling with two young children, I’m still trying to figure out how I’m supposed to schlep all the necessary stuff plus their car seats through the airport.
This is how I envisioned it: I would roll my carry-on suitcase with one hand, set my secondary carry-on on top of that, hoping it wouldn’t slip off, and sling a booster seat in its carrying case over each shoulder. Each child would roll her own carry-on suitcase, and somehow I would still have hands free to help them on and off the multitudes of escalators and keep them from rolling their bags over grumpy business travelers’ toes.
You can imagine my relief when, just before leaving the house, I spoke to a rental car agent who assured me that the company had plenty of booster seats available for parents like me who flinch at the idea of carrying extra seats on trips. Problem solved!
Or so I thought — until I got to the rental car desk at the hotel just after it closed for the weekend. (No one had bothered to tell me it was doing so at 2 p.m. that day.) The promised booster seats were securely locked inside the rental car, which we conveniently couldn’t gain access to.
Lucky for me, the kids were perfectly happy playing on the beach and eating mac and cheese poolside at the hotel, eliminating our need for a car and booster seats.
This got me wondering, though, how the rest of the parenting world travels. Do you take your car seats with you? Are you comfortable using used car seats from rental car companies? What do parents in New York do in taxi cabs? Use the comments section below to share your tips and tricks with the more clueless parent travelers among us (specifically, me).
Comments
We are on vacation with a rental car right now and my husband just ran to the local target and picked up a couple of seats for less than $20 each. He promptly came back to the airport to get us and voila - new boosters for less than half what the rental place wanted to charge us. We're planning to donate them when we leave...
Posted by: Emily | Mar 19, 2008 7:55:05 AM
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My wife and I had one situation with our Daughter, where we had to rent a car and car seat. In short, I would never rely on the a rental car seat again. The seat physically looked OK, but I quickly realized that it was not put together correctly. The straps were installed improperly and could not be adjusted at all. After spending some 15 minutes with the seat, I finally got the straps installed properly and then installed the seat in the car. Fortunately for us, I was able to do that. I fear for the other child that used the seat before us though. What would have happened if someone else came across that situation and they didn't notice the problem, or weren't able to fix it? We have been fortunate that we haven't had to rent car seats with car rentals lately, but I think if we had a trip planned with a rental car on the other end, I'd bring my own car seats.
Posted by: Brad | Mar 17, 2008 2:36:45 PM