Day Zero: Red Eye for the One Year Old

Question: is is better to take a teething one-year-old on a red-eye flight or a regular hour flight?

Bookending a voyage to the Hudson Valley and environs in the states of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey, we attempted to answer just that question.

The first flight was the red-eye. After a delay, we left Long Beach around 10:30 pm and landed around 6:30 am local time in Queens at Kennedy Airport. Cass, our teething one-year-old, did pretty well. He slept for a large portion of the flight, which was mostly made possible by our splurging on an extra seat.

I had the aisle, Corrie the window, and spread between us---feet in her lap and head in mine---was our surprisingly long toddler. In the moments when he came to, or roused but not truly waking, as babies do (right?), he would start screaming. We'd comfort him, he'd chill out, and a little bit later it would repeat. That was sleeping. When awake, Cass was a flirty ham, like always, making eyes at any woman he could see.

All in all, couldn't really ask for anything better.

We landed and got our luggage. Being experienced travelers, we try to travel as light as possible, and throwing an extra tiny human into the mix was a neat wrinkle to work out. We brought our car seat, and still felt like we packed relatively light. Once at the rental car, we had our first hold up.

It was one of the new push-button start autos, and we couldn't start it. I ran back to the lady at the rental desk to ask for advice. She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, in a thick Jamaican accent, "Just like ya' cahr at 'ome, press the brake and turn it on."

"My car's a manual..." I was saying as I left, not finishing the sentence because she had no idea about that which I spoke. If I'm in neutral, like many other stick-shifts, you don't need to press anything to start it beyond the key.

We decided against breakfast in the nearby Far Rockaway, a beachy enclave nestled in the far reaches in Queens not unlike the town from Jaws, and headed the other way, to Brooklyn. We ate at Junior's, locally famous for its cheesecake.

Does this look like a boy fresh off a red eye flight from coastal California?

The food wasn't very good, but morning diners in downtown Brooklyn are surprisingly rare. We felt like it was too early to head to Dobbs Ferry (the first town past Yonkers, which is the first town past the Bronx) without getting swamped in traffic, so we headed to Fort Greene Park and played for a while.

Eventually we hit the road for Marc and Linda's place, finally getting to meet their daughter and getting to see their boy for the first time in four years.