My Stubborn Quest to Turn My Newborn Into a World Traveler

Can a father pass down wanderlust? While adventuring through Portuguese islands, Irish pubs and New York, one overwhelmed dad tries to find out

For the Traveler’s Tale series, we ask writers to share their most indelible travel memories.

Sebastian Modak

The first time my baby, Felix, laughed, we were in a Lisbon hotel room. He was sprawled on a coffee table I’d converted into a changing station. As I extracted a noxious diaper from his squirming form and hummed a deranged, jet-lagged version of our diaper-change song, sounds of the waking city floated in through an open window. Something in that sensory maelstrom set him off, and he started to cackle: a sound that could clear clouds, move mountains, bring about world peace. He was 4 months old, 3,300 miles from home, on day one of his very first trip. My masterplan, to shape my son into a traveler, was in motion.

In his first eight months, my wife, Maggie, and I took Felix to museums in Lisbon, sea cliffs in Madeira, hikes into the Grand Canyon and a meandering road trip along Ireland’s west coast. In between those trips, with Maggie back at work and me on parental leave, I continued his international education at home in New York, introducing him to Uzbek kebab joints in South Brooklyn and Egyptian seafood markets in Queens.

Father and son take in the view of the bay in the Irish village of Roundstone.

I’d like to say that my mission to shape my child as a down-for-anything wanderer stemmed from some high-minded commitment to pass down a set of values I cherish as a lifelong, obsessive traveler: curiosity, adaptability, respect, fearlessness, empathy.

In reality, our adventures were born out of something closer to panic. In my first months of fatherhood, bewildered by just how much I did not know, I focused on what I did: how to go, go, go.

The author on one of his first flights as a child.

Because of my father’s work, I moved constantly as a child. By the time I graduated high school in Indonesia, I’d lived in five countries and traveled to dozens more. What I gave up in stability, I gained in an insatiable appetite to know the world.

While other 5-year-olds were poring over dinosaur taxonomy, I was memorizing flags and capitals. I didn’t just read Tintin comics: I studied the finely drawn scenes in Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and China. As I grew up, and saw those places in real life, my feet only got itchier.

The more Felix and I traveled the more I thought of my own childhood. Certain questions began to come into focus. Can wanderlust be taught? Was this overstimulation even good for his little brain—and did any of it even matter considering he still lacked the ability to form memories?

I wondered whether I was fulfilling a paternal obligation to show this child just how far the horizon goes, or merely projecting myself onto him. Thankfully, new parenthood leaves little time to linger on this kind of self-reflection—and, in the meantime, we were having fun.

In New York, I’d pack up the diaper bag most mornings, strap him into the stroller or onto my chest in a carrier, and we’d be off, two tourists in our own town. I used the opportunity to finally burn through the “Want to go” tags on my Google Maps, crisscrossing all five New York boroughs on gastronomic and cultural quests.

Strangers helped carry the stroller down subway stairs. Bartenders offered pints of warm water to heat bottles of milk. At Ba Xuyên, a fluorescent-lit temple to the bánh mì sandwich in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, an elderly woman behind the counter insisted on watching Felix while I ran through the rain to the ATM across the street. She scooped him up with the confidence of someone who had a lot more experience at this than I did. Stepping out into the downpour, I was surprised that I wasn’t worried—just grateful.

When I recounted our adventures to Maggie, I spoke not of having to change Felix’s diaper in the confines of a tiny restaurant bathroom, my body undergoing contortions that would make my chiropractor weep; or of the Midtown meltdown in Times Square (mine, not Felix’s); or of all the moments my own insecurities as a new parent threatened to overwhelm me. These travails didn’t define the days. I hoped that eventually Felix might understand they are simply the cost of doing business.

The travel indoctrination continued on his first flight, when somewhere over the Atlantic, a Portuguese woman seated next to us insisted on holding Felix briefly to give us a break. On Madeira, he adapted to the new time zone more quickly than we did, mostly napped through long hikes and grew, day by day, into a person who smiles and laughs and stares contemplatively at his hands on long car rides.

A few months later, in the seaside village of Roundstone, in Ireland’s Connemara region, he waved his arms excitedly at the cormorants fishing in the bay. He charmed an entire pub in the West Cork village of Schull, as he sat in my arms transfixed by the trills, rolls and stomps of a traditional jam session. Of course, he also cried, and fussed, and blew out his diaper at the worst possible moments. Looming over the good times was the knowledge that it would get even harder to travel as he got older and learned to say “no” and ask “are we there yet?” (For reasons I have yet to grasp, other parents love to remind me of this.)

If this moment in time—when I can lift my child onto my shoulders to see a sunset and he can only gape and gurgle—is truly fleeting, I’ll make it count. If Felix never forms concrete memories of these impressions, I’m still determined to flood his senses with enough worldly beauty that his subconscious retains its residue. I have work to do yet.

Felix stops to touch the daisies on a hiking trail in Ireland.

At this point, you might expect to find all the expert tips I’ve picked up from bringing a baby with me on trans-Atlantic flights, mountain hikes and to two-hour multicourse meals. How to pack a single suitcase for a family of three’s European vacation, maybe, or how to choose a key in which to sing “Rock-a-bye Baby” so it harmonizes with the drone of an airplane cabin. But I don’t know any of that—mastering travel with Felix was never the point. Raising a child is hard anywhere; we had just decided to do it on-the-go for a bit.

Now back at home and back to work, I’ve spotted evidence that our efforts are bearing fruit. I notice he smiles wide every time I strap him into the stroller and wheel him out of our Brooklyn apartment. He seems impervious to disruptions in his routine. Look at this little adventurer, I think, ready to take on the world. A boy who smiles, unblinking, into the unknown. Then again, could he instead be simply reflecting the smile that’s undoubtedly plastered across my face as I introduce him to the world?

Sebastian Modak is the travel editor of The Wall Street Journal’s Off Duty section.

My Stubborn Quest to Turn My Newborn Into a World Traveler

My Stubborn Quest to Turn My Newborn Into a World Traveler

My Stubborn Quest to Turn My Newborn Into a World Traveler

My Stubborn Quest to Turn My Newborn Into a World Traveler