Traveling With a Kid Totally Rocks: Airport Transfer

Okay, okay.  Travelling with my baby rocks…though now she is a toddler.  This past January while we were visiting the Lake District and West Yorkshire, she did marvelously.  While we didn’t receive the holy grail of traveling with kids (i.e. upgraded), by and large, we were treated with the courtesy that every traveler should be treated.  In this series of posts, I’ll reflect on what I learned traveling with her, what I’ll repeat and what I’ll never do again (queue theme from “Gone With the Wind”).

Travelling Through Atlanta:

Admittedly, Atlanta is not the best city to try to travel in without a car.  The trains don’t go places people want (unless you’re flying in on business), the buses are much the same, but with not frequent service.  And its only getting worse as MARTA just announced budget cuts (but that’s another blog for for later).  We just couldn’t imagine trying to get all our stuff down to the Airport from our house.  There would have been a taxi ride of less than a mile, one train transfer, and the reality that MARTA really wasn’t designed for people traveling with children in mind.

So how would we get our luggage and her”stuff” to the airport?  We hired a town car.  We didn’t need a car seat on the plane and we weren’t renting a car.  Paying for two weeks parking at Atlanta Airport was about $12 USD per day–money we could spend doing something fun.  And there was the promise that they would pick us up at the airport upon arrival.  Door to door service.  Wonderful, right?  Well, this decision was a mixed bag.  On the good side, the driver was pleasant, went out of his way to purchase a car seat just for our trip to and from the airport (he said we could use our won car seat and he would “store it for us”.  Umm.. no thanks.  In exchange for a tip, he asked if we would bring him some chocolate covered peanuts from Marks and Spencer.  The only negative I had was that he forgot to pick us up.  Of course, when he called later in the week to get paid, he says he was there.  But our plane was late and we waited for an hour on top of that.  Out of his “kindness” he didn’t charge us for the return leg of our journey.  How kind.  He should have been there managing a cranky kid whose body clock was turned upside down while waiting for someone who was supposed to call me.

Aside from having to pay an ungodly amount of money to get a taxi to take us home, I think I’ll hire a car again to get to the aiport.  Only this time, I’ll get the driver’s cell phone