Traveling With an Infant - Accommodations Considerations

Here are some things to consider when you're choosing your accommodations for your trip:

• Room Location - Request and get a room that is close to a bus stop. In fact, the first bus stop on the route is nice as it facilitates travel to the parks substantially. For one thing, in the morning you're much more likely to get on a bus that's relatively empty (so it's easier to find seats and a place to stash the stroller, etc.). You'll have to sit through a "commute" around your resort then, but at least you'll be seated. Also, on the way back to the resort, you're among the first people dropped off. Since you're more likely to be tired then, versus the trip TO the park, it's nice to avoid the commute around the resort...especially if you weren't fortunate enough to get seats for the return trip (dealing with a stroller while standing on a moving bus is a wild experience).

• Room Amenities - If you can swing it, a room with kitchen facilities is very handy for bottle feeders.

• The in-room laundry that we had at Old Key West Resort was very handy. The Boardwalk Villas Resort and the Villas at the Disney Institute also have rooms with that feature. Of course, if you have the wherewithal to pack enough clothes, spit rags, etc. so that you don't need to do laundry, this isn't an issue.

• Cribs, Etc. - You can request a crib for a room at any Disney hotel (and I'm sure that non-Disney hotels can accommodate a baby, too). At Old Key West, the two-bedroom vacation homes are permanently equipped with a Pack-N-Play. At some non-Disney hotels that we've stayed at in the past, we've had the misfortune of being provided with a very poor quality port-a-cribs that were flimsy and even dangerous. (One in the Seattle area had several loose screws that eventually worked their way out of their respective brackets and dropped onto the baby's sleeping surface. Fortunately, we found it before he ate it.)  When Allan was an infant and toddler, we took our "Happy Camper" Pack-N-Play kind of a unit, by Evenflo. The "Happy Camper", that has a bassinet attachment. By the way, Graco makes the name brand Pack-N-Play which is a similar unit, but Graco's bassinet doesn't support the baby's weight as well as the Evenflo one does. Also, we really liked the ease of set-up of the newer design "Happy Camper". It's really quite simple for one person to set up by themselves without taking a yoga class or earning an engineering degree.