The following is excerpted from A Gelato A Day, a collection of family travel stories edited by Claudia Laroye © 2022. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Guernica Editions. 
I?ve cage dived with crocodiles, hung off the side of holy mountains in China, and raced horses in Mongolia. But here?s the truth: The thought of travelling for the first time with my four-year-old daughter Raquel and nine-month-old son Galileo terrified me.
Curly-haired Raquel appears to have fallen Obelix-like into a cauldron of Red Bull. She?s a spirited T4 bull in the China shop of my tranquillity. With a head yet to discover the stars, Galileo is newly teething, crawling, and addicted to wrapping his gums and baby carrot fingers around any hazard he can find. Sure, Raquel had already been across Canada, Brazil and New York, but it?s different when they?re babies, too young to put spiders in their mouths. It?s different when there?s two of them. The sooner my kids learn to travel, the better, and so I thought I?d start somewhere easy: direct flight, warm, and with a range of family-friendly accommodation options. I often tell friends that expectations are the death of successful travel. It?s no picnic on parenthood too. Before I got my hopes too high, it was important to acknowledge the facts: Children under the age of five are erratic, inefficient, agitated, annoying, moody, and masters of pushing buttons. Sure, you love them more than anything in the world, and there are moments of such...