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What a Long, Strange Trip This Could Be

Traveling with a small child requires flexibility. And a certain tolerance for fetishes.

Thanks to one of those wonderfully random circumstances in life (read: having friends who are interesting and well-connected who somehow get you included in cool events by association), we find ourselves invited to a wedding in Indonesia in the fall. And not just any wedding. The bride is the daughter of a former member of the Indonesian Parliament.

We’re so fancy.

Even though this is obviously a fantastic opportunity, we’re trying to decide if a 30-hour trip with a 5-year-old child will age us faster than mentioning Shaun Cassidy was the first concert you ever attended to a group of 20-something colleagues and having them ask, “Who’s Shaun Cassidy?”

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Hypothetically, of course.

My daughter, so far, is a , probably because she has already traveled quite a bit. She’s flexible and handles unexpected circumstances that often arise during travel, just like we have learned to do.

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Right before our daughter was born five years ago, my husband and I, in the cute way that new parents who have no clue how much a 6-pound being will change every single aspect of their lives, planned a vacation in Key West. It was our thought that if we got her traveling early, that travel would become part of her life. So, a couple months after she was born when we were completely sleep-deprived and feeling very much in over our heads, we packed up our little family for a nice, quiet family vacation and flew to Florida.

And landed right in the middle of Fantasy Fest. To our credit, Fantasy Fest is usually held in October. But due to a hurricane hitting Key West in October of that year, it had been postponed to December — on the same weekend we were visiting.

What is Fantasy Fest, you ask? It is similar to Mardi Gras with the drinking and debauchery, but has the added advantage of being more lewd and including more nudity. It also embraces and displays almost every fetish you could imagine (and many you are hopefully lucky enough to never imagine).

And yet, with all that going on, we were the ones who stood out because we were the only ones there with a baby. Although, we were not the only ones there with someone who was sucking on a pacie and wearing a diaper. *Involuntary shudder*

We ended up really enjoying ourselves and appreciating what a spectacle our normal middle-class suburban family was in this situation. (I don’t know if we thought it was funnier to take family photos with the men in the butt-less chaps, or if they thought it was funnier to take photos with us.)

So, hopefully, I’ll be submitting a future column from Bali. I wonder if there is a Balinese Fantasy Fest?

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