Have baby, will travel

By Ellen Creager

Detroit Free Press (TNS)

Veteran traveler Adrian Jarosz has stamps in his passport, can sleep on a plane and has six international trips under his belt.

He is 3 years old.

“If we drive past an airport, he cries if he can’t fly on a plane,” says his mom, Agatha Jarosz, of South Lyon, Mich.

She sees no reason why Adrian should stay home when he could be flying to Europe or sampling Central America. Due with her second child in July, she’s planning to take both children to Poland next year, seeing the world with both tots in tow.

Adrian probably won’t remember a single one of his baby travels, which has taken him to Poland twice, Curacao, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, St. Martin, Martinique and 10 states. But his mother says there’s a larger life lesson for her young son.

“Maybe the travel will make him more open,” she says. “Maybe it will make him enjoy different things instead of being scared.”

American women are having fewer children than ever. Nearly half of women between ages 15 and 44 are childless, according to new U.S. Census data, up from 42 percent in 2000. Part of that trend could stem from the belief that if you have a baby, your traveling days come to a screeching halt.

Wrong, says Jarosz, 30. She grew up with the travel bug and has been to 58 countries and territories and 33 states, mostly with her father, grandmother or husband, Mariusz.

For the last eight years, the family has used Patricia Schultz’s “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” (Workman, $19.95) as a guidebook, checking off the countries they have visited.

Now, Adrian is the fourth generation to join the family quest.

Get her talking about travel, and you soon realize there is more to Jarosz’s motivation than just taking vacations.

For Jarosz, travel quite literally means freedom. The ability to travel freely is something her family never takes for granted.

Jarosz, born in 1985, lived in Poland until she was 7. Her parents and grandparents remember pre-1989 Communist rule there and its severe restrictions on travel, when their passports were held, phones were tapped and the places they could go were tightly limited.

Her father, Jack Duszynski, recalls years when “we had restrictions on the passport. We could travel around Poland and some other Communist countries the government allowed us,” but few other places.

As soon as the family moved to the U.S. in 1992, Agatha’s father started taking his only child on trips all over the world.

Now, it’s Adrian’s turn.

“He’s the next generation,” Duszynski says. “He wants to travel as much as he can, and he always asks, when are we going to go for the plane? When are we going to go for the hotel?”

As for the complications of traveling with his daughter and tiny grandson, “She helps me, so if I can help her raise the boy, it’s a pleasure to me. It’s very perfect.”

Jarosz’s parents are divorced, and her father likes to travel while her mother does not.

But she still remembers the biggest trip of her life she took with both of them: the day they moved to the U.S. She was 7 years old and spoke no English.

“I remember flying in on the plane, and we flew into Newark, and there was a problem because we didn’t fly into New York and we couldn’t call anyone to tell them, because there weren’t cellphones, and I remember driving on the highway,” she says. After that bumpy start, they lived in New York for seven months, then moved to the Detroit area.

Soon, she was an American girl. Who took a family vacation. And then another. And another. And another.

“The first place we went was to Cancun. It was August and hurricane season, which we didn’t know, and that’s why it was so cheap. But we were OK. Then we went to Colorado, Virginia, California, the Grand Canyon. And then we started going to Europe when I was 10, to France, Holland and Belgium and Italy. I’d go with my dad and grandma. Then after that we would start traveling to warm places like South America, the Caribbean, Spain and Morocco, and Southeast Asia.”

That wide experience gives her courage to travel with Adrian now.

“One time I was planning to take him to Costa Rica for a wedding, and I remember thinking, ‘Is it safe? Where are the hospitals? Was it going to be OK?’” she says. Her fears were unfounded. She took him, nobody got sick and the Costa Rican culture was family-friendly.

Jarosz admits that traveling with a child, even an easygoing one like Adrian, is not as simple as traveling in carefree single days.

Still, it’s worth it, she wants to tell other young mothers.

“You can still do the trips,” she says. “You might not be able to pack in as much or sleep on trains in Europe, but you can do it. It’s worth it.”