London With A Baby: Part One

In March 2022, when our daughter was just four months old, Matt and I took her on her first international trip. We had two British Airways vouchers direct to London (remnants of a canceled Covid trip) and I was still basking in the freedom of maternity leave.

Day 1\

We left the United States with a few things in tow: a travel stroller, a diaper bag, one huge suitcase filled with all of our clothes, and a whopping dose of optimism and naïveté. I find that those two latter items were some of the most important things we brought with us for two weeks traveling the UK with our sweet little girl.

Sleeping baby on her first British Airways flight

So, how exactly was traveling with an infant? Honestly, fantastic. Both easier and harder than we expected. We definitely got lucky choosing to travel with a younger baby. The pros of our daughter being young were many: she still was sleeping quite a lot; she couldn’t crawl or move around a ton, and didn’t want to; and she liked being carried and transported in a cozy stroller. The cons: mainly, fears about Covid. I was worried about exposing our child to sickness with all the traveling, but we took a lot of safety measures before and during the trip to make sure we were as safe as possible (read: Covid testing, wearing masks, covering her with blankets in public spaces, keeping her stroller cover on at all times, eating our meals in our room at the hotel instead of going to dinner, not entering many museums or heavily-trafficked areas).

Safe in her stroller at Buckingham Palace

And now, we have a pretty well-traveled baby! Since traveling to the UK, we’ve also taken her to Palm Springs, San Francisco, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, and Florida. And she seems to love it, although as she gets older, she gets much harder to fly with!

Dealing with international jet lag with an infant was also a bit tricky, but our daughter adjusted much better than we did. Being parents meant neither of us could sleep on the long-haul red eye flight like we normally try to do–because one of us was holding our baby as she slept, and I don’t like to fall asleep when I am holding her. Choosing to take the red eye was great for her though because she slept the entire 10-hour flight to London. It was her natural bedtime! Then, we we arrived in the UK, she continued to sleep in her stroller as we traveled to our hotel.

The first day of our trip was the hardest travel day I’ve ever had. We arrived at our hotel at 10am London time (around 3-4am our time), thoroughly exhausted from not sleeping on the plane. I was breastfeeding and eager to get into our room to feed our daughter and give her a good nap in a real crib. Despite requesting early check-in, though, the manager told us our room wouldn’t be ready for six more hours. Proceed to: me feeding the baby in a bathroom; then again in a pub; then again in another bathroom . . . and us walking around London like actual zombies while our precious baby slept peacefully in her stroller.

We did try to have fun that day, despite going on 30+ hours of no sleep: we visited Buckingham Palace, saw the Horse Guards Parade, saw some (royal?) visitors arriving at and departing from Spencer House, bought her some adorable British baby clothes from children’s stores, grabbed coffees in St. James’s Park, walked to Trafalgar Square, and strolled the neighborhood.

We stayed relatively close to our hotel–The Stafford in St. James’s Park–just in case they called and told us our room was ready early.

A lesson I learned from this experience: when traveling with young children, considering booking the hotel room for the night before you get there, just so you can immediately check in at 10am and rest a little. Of course, that option is expensive, and Matt and I had a lively debate about whether it would be worth it to spend $$$$ on a room just to not have to walk around London completely exhausted for 6 hours with a baby.

Another infant travel tip–do consider paying more for a nice hotel. We didn’t need to splurge on The Stafford (a luxury, 5-star hotel) since we booked it in the off-season, so it didn’t feel like we were shelling out more money for a nicer place. But it was extremely nice to have a big suite and a fantastic hotel staff that could help us out with requests like a safe crib and in-room food service. That first night, in fact, we ordered takeout from the hotel dining room and fell asleep by 8pm (we would learn the hard way that it is just worth it to skip fancy restaurants when you have a baby and go for the room service instead). Somehow, our daughter slept through the night, and we woke up blessedly refreshed. We seriously have the sweetest kid.

Day 2

On Day 2, feeling incredible, we ordered a ~posh~ hotel breakfast with French press coffee and then dressed our daughter in warm clothes. March in the UK isn’t exactly balmy. Here’s where I plug our travel stroller. In our real lives, we use a super heavy-duty Uppa Baby Vista Stroller that is heavy and massive and super safe.

But we refused to lug that with us on our trip, so we bought the Colugo Stroller, which ended up being amazing for traveling! It only weighs 16 lbs and folds easily into a backpack that you can wear. You can open it one-handed with a particularly cool-looking wrist flick. And it has several settings to fit a variety of children. Our daughter being so young, we reclined it pretty far so she could lie flat and sleep. We also purchased an infant insert headrest for her to make sure her head didn’t rattle around when traversing the London streets. Since London, we’ve also taken it with us to California twice, and even as our daughter got older and bigger, we found she loved riding around in it!

with our sweet, sweet London friend Rose

We met up with a close friend in the Buckingham/St. James’s Park area and traveled over to some London classics: Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the London Eye.

We crossed the Thames and headed up the river, eating lunch on the South Bank.

We passed the National Theatre, stopped in another baby’s clothing store (where we got our daughter a onesie with a double decker bus on it!), and then came upon some heavy hitters: Millennium Bridge, the Globe Theatre, open-air Borough Market, the Shard, the Western Arcade, the HMS Belfast, and finally, Tower Bridge.

We then caught an Uber water taxi back to Westminster, which was so easy and fun. The taxi ride took only about ten minutes to get down the Thames, and was perfect for escaping the drizzly, misty London fog that was beginning to set in.

We ended our day with a bad decision that at first seemed like a marvelous decision: dinner at the super-trendy Ivy Chelsea Garden. There, we met a close friend of mine who lives in London for dinner. It was past our daughter’s bedtime (7pm) and the restaurant had a live DJ. Needless to say, dinner was difficult because our daughter screamed the entire time.

After cocktails and appetizers, I left the restaurant in tears with our baby, holding her in the relative quiet of the street while Matt settled the tab. We resolved never to bring her to a restaurant past her bedtime ever again. No hate, please—we are still learning what she can tolerate and what she can’t! It was naïve of us to believe she would sleep through dinner in her cozy stroller. In the end, it was a lesson learned and a good story to tell her when she’s older!