How do you be green when traveling with kids?

We recently took a short family trip to San Diego, and we were wondering what are ways we could be more eco-friendly when traveling?

Below are a few things we did and did not do - do you have any suggestions?

1. Lodging: where else can we look?

We didn't specifically look for a eco-friendly hotel, but we were pleasantly surprised that The Sofia Hotel had a couple eco-friendly touches like good, proactive recycling and energy efficiency in addition to the standard water conservation practices.

Where else can we look for eco-friendly lodging?

2. Transportation there: is this the hardest to change?

We drove from LA to San Diego. Since our hotel was in downtown and not that far from the train station, we briefly looked into Amtrak. But we quickly realized that toting around all of our stuff (luggage, stroller, camera bag, Kaiya's goodies) would be a nightmare and that we would want to be able to drive around in San Diego since places like La Jolla and Pacific Beach are not served well. I don't know that there is much we can do differently here until we don't need as much gear for Kaiya.

3. Getting around: how do we make this fun and easy?

Working in a mix of walking and public transit is totally doable. It all starts with where you stay (preferably in a walkable neighborhood with access to public transit), as well as planning ahead (looking up where public transit goes, schedules and not over-planning activities so there is enough time).

In San Diego, we stayed in downtown which was convenient for walking to the Gaslamp and East Village neighborhoods and jumping on different types of public transit (train, buses, trolley and ferry). We did take the trolley from downtown to East Village for brunch one day - and it was nice because Kaiya loves buses and trains so it was fun for her too. And taking the Ferry to Coronado was on the docket but we just didn't have enough time.

The challenging part is working in public transit to other destinations. We looked into taking the bus to the zoo, but it didn't match up with brunch plans right before and we were worried about making the ride home at the end of a long day longer than it needed to be.

4. Food: easiest to do

This is probably the easiest thing to do if you really want - looking for restaurants that serve local and organic foods, and buying snacks from local and/or "green" grocery stores. Since this is what we like anyway, it's nice too much of a stretch. At the same time, when going to a place as tourists, we always want to try interesting places with good food regardless of their eco-friendly slant - so it can be challenging to balance this and make all the meals this way.

5. Activities: not that hard to do either

This can be relatively easy to do as well, especially with little kids since they are amused by simple things. Visiting parks, beaches, farms and zoos are easy activities with little environmental impact and get kiddies out into nature.

6. Stuff: ???

What do we do with all the disposable stuff? Water bottles? Tissue and napkins? Plastic utensils when we're on the go? Plastic bags when we buy stuff? It's convenient enough for us to use cloth napkins, bring tupperware and reusable canvas bags when when we're at home, but we just haven't gotten into the habit of bringing and washing this stuff when we're on the road. Do we just need to get in the habit and plan ahead?

Encouraging kids to exercise

Just read an interesting article on a non-profit organization called "Freiker" that encourages kids to walk or bike to school in return for the chance to win small prizes at the end of the year. While the material incentive system may or may not be the right one to underpin a program like this, there is no questioning the rationale behind getting kids to exercise more.

As stated in the article, 88 percent of students who lived within a mile of their grade schools got there by walking or biking in 1969. Today, the number has fallen to less than 16 percent. The rest now get dropped off, adding to carbon emissions, childhood obesity, and the plain-old bad habit of equating travel with a car.

Freiker aims to change this by instituting an accounting system for kids to record the number of trips they have biked or walked to school and competing with other kids at their schools for prizes based on the most trips during a school year. As of today, their website listed 130,000+ trips already since the non-profit started up 3 years ago. Let's hope the message gets out, and we can get more and more kids to use their own power to get to school. Carbon and physical fitness are definite upsides, but for me personally? Raising a generation of children who see that there are more options than just a car and who appreciate exercise.. this is the real payoff to me.

Kids. Walking. Duh.

"They set up a piedibus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco's twisting streets to the schools' gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands." (full story here.)

I have to admit that I smiled when I first read this article, as I pictured a long line of kids walking to school with a few adults herding them, no doubt skipping and laughing the whole way there. To me, this seems like a no-brainer. Let's not even get into the potential environmental benefit - let's just talk about getting children into the habit of walking and exercising, something that happens far too little in the lives of today's children.

We begin, through our own choices, to teach children very early on that time is money, and often more important than things like exercise or quality. I remember when I was kindergarten young, my mother used to walk me to and from school, and after I started going to school normal hours, I'd walk with my sister. While I've never really considered it before, I think this habit of walking to school was rather formative. Living outside of the US (and away from LA) has allowed me to rediscover my appreciation of walking. Living in Hong Kong or Budapest or Lund, walking one or two miles to get somewhere again become something commonplace and expected in my life. I rather like it this way.

Now, let's get to the short and long term benefits of walking. Short-term - as the article points out, less carbon emissions, better health, more quality social time with other kids, interacting with the real world, and a better sense of community. The long-term benefits (which also include the positives from building a sense of community) are things like comfort with walking, greater appreciation of nature, a different notion of the value of time, and other intangibles that stem from reconnecting to our bipedal-selves. Moreover, if we can get kids to be comfortable with walking from an early age, it could translate into adults who are comfortable with walking - perhaps the start of an anti-car revolution for those trips that last less than a couple of blocks. It also doesn't hurt to have parents interact more and help create stronger bonds within a community.

I think we should all push for more "piedibus" in our own communities. Don't you?