Travelling with young kids means holidays are no longer relaxing

I can't see anything out of the back of the car. The view of the road behind us is blocked by a stroller, a small mattress, a port-a-cot, a bag full of "bedroom stuff", a toilet seat, a high chair, some emergency provisions and about 50 changes of clothes.

We have all this stuff for a four-day trip. Four days away from our house, in another house about an hour up the highway. Seriously, if we've forgotten anything – which, going by the state of the car boot, surely we haven't – I could just drive home and pick it up and be back on our holiday again in time for lunch.

Four days, and yet the car is absolutely chock-a-block. Seriously, you could barely fit a cigarette paper in there.

This, of course, is because we have kids. Two kids. Young kids. One aged three, the other, one. The three-year-old is talking non-stop from the back seat as we zoom up the highway, about trees and birds and cars and Harry Skinner from daycare and space wings and Buzz Lightyear and how he's going to show us he can fly. The one-year-old is blubbering along in unison because this is apparently what we do.

My partner and I are frazzled. Fried. The sheer effort it takes to get out the door with these two children. The days of planning and packing. The military-style checklists. The physical work of getting it all done. "This is going to be fun, right?" my partner says. "I mean, it has to be better than our last trip…"

There's no such thing as a relaxing holiday when you have young kids: there's no relaxing, and there's no holiday. They just don't exist. You can't switch off. You can't stop for a minute. The concept of holidays ceases to exist.

This is something no one tells you before you become a parent. Particularly a parent who likes to travel. From now on, or at least for the next four or five years of your precious travelling life, the pursuit you love is going to be hard. Really, really hard. Unrecognisably difficult.

On this "holiday" up to Patonga to "relax" for a few days, my partner and I are reminded of a great article she recently discovered, detailing all the differences between a "vacation" and a "trip". A vacation, the story says (it's American), is the thing you used to take before you had kids. Now, you take trips. Now you look at each other in the front of an overstuffed car and say things like, "This is going to be fun. Right?"

You can travel when you have young kids, of course. You can go places and you can do things. In fact if you take a glance at the comments section below this story you'll probably find all sorts of people talking with genuine sincerity about the wonder of travelling with children and how pleasurable it is and how the presence of your offspring can make the whole experience even more rewarding.