Traveling with baby...

After our week in Portland and Hood River, Oregon, we have learned quite a bit about traveling with Baby Jo. I'll have more of an update of how our vacay went later this week, but in the meantime, here are a few things we learned:

1. If you are flying, try try try to sit in the bulk head row. The added leg room and play room for baby make up for the lack of storage space. The only other downside is the noise that the flight attendants make can be distracting if your baby is trying to sleep. But I suppose this can happen anywhere on the plane. As can a flight attendant dropping pretzels on your sleeping baby, waking them up. Argh.
2. Wipe down everything around you on the plane with some sort of cleaning wipe. Seriously, everywhere. Jo had her hands all over, even on our lovely seat neighbors. I wish I could have wiped down THEIR hands. Why do strangers think it's ok to touch babies they don't know?
3. It's easy to check a car seat, just ask the airline attendant to put it in a plastic bag. 
4. Did you know that Southwest checks bikes for free from PDX airport either in June or July every year? We didn't -- but we certainly were happy about it. Score.
5. Our little honey badger didn't care at all about the time change (2 hours difference between Portland and Chicago). This just meant Nick and I went to bed around 9pm to wake up with her around 5am. Fun.
6. If you're traveling with others, be sure that they are flexible and not expecting you to be on their schedule. Our travel partners were super cool. We had fun together. We had fun separately. Everyone was chill and a great time was had. The key here is that everyone has similar expectations.