The Westin South Coast Plaza

The trip where we realized this is getting easier

This was our fourth real trip with the twins, and somewhere between packing the car and getting everyone into the hotel room, Linda and I had the same realization.

This is getting easier.

They were two now — not 14 months, not 18 months — and despite everything you’ve heard about the terrible twos, traveling with them felt remarkably more manageable.

Maybe we’ve gotten better at this. We definitely have.

But they also simply need less stuff.

At two, their personalities are enormous, their opinions are very clear, and chaos remains fully operational. But they can walk. They can tell us things. They can get excited about where we’re going. They can play with stickers in the car. And we no longer have to relocate what feels like an entire nursery every time we spend two nights somewhere else.

Linda has started calling this stage the whimsical chaotic twos, which feels much more accurate.

This trip wasn’t really about staying at a destination hotel. We were heading down to visit family in Newport Beach and wanted a practical base that would make the rest of the weekend easy.

The Westin South Coast Plaza ended up doing exactly that.

First, we had to survive the drive

There was one new variable this time.

We have discovered that our son gets carsick.

The drive is roughly two hours for us, so instead of pretending everything would probably be fine, we packed for the possibility that it very much would not be.

Linda kept vomit bags, towels and a complete change of clothes within reach in the front of the car rather than buried somewhere in the luggage.

We also changed our timing.

The kids played hard before we left. Once they were genuinely tired, we put them in the car after the morning traffic and both of them fell asleep.

This has become one of the useful discoveries of traveling at two: if we hit the timing correctly, they sleep remarkably well in the car.

There is, however, a very narrow border between happily tired and so overtired that only my own bed will do, and we are still learning exactly where that border is.

After they woke up, sticker activity books and games got us through the rest of the drive. Linda sat in the back with them because we weren’t yet sure how the motion sickness situation would go.

No one threw up.

An auspicious beginning.

What has helped us with carsickness

This is our experience with our own child, not medical advice, and we are still working it out as we go.

We have found that giving him his real meal well before a longer drive and keeping food during the drive extremely simple works better for him.

On this trip we mostly avoided food in the car other than a couple of pretzels and occasional sips of water.

Even some dried fruit hasn’t worked particularly well for him, so we’re learning his individual triggers as we go.

The bigger lesson wasn’t that we discovered some universal solution. We didn’t.

It was that once we knew carsickness was now part of our travel equation, we packed and planned around it instead of hoping it wouldn’t happen.

We finally learned how to pack the car

By the time we pulled up to the Westin around lunchtime, another small piece of our family-travel system had clicked into place.

Everything in the back of the car was organized so the bell staff could remove it in essentially one sweep.

This sounds incredibly boring until you’ve tried standing at a hotel entrance with two toddlers while bags, stroller parts, snacks and sleep equipment appear to be multiplying around you.

We also remembered tipping cash this time.

Progress.

We had also called ahead before this trip, explained the twins’ nap schedule, and asked whether an earlier check-in might be possible. On this visit the hotel was able to accommodate us, which set up the rest of the afternoon. We would ask again — and we would also plan for the answer to be no.

What we packed differently at two

The floor bed came.

The floor bed is apparently a member of the family now.

It takes up a heroic amount of space, but we use it constantly, so unlike some of the gear we brought on earlier trips, it has earned its place in the car.

For swimming, we simplified.

We skipped the bulky inflatables we’d brought on an earlier trip and packed their floaties plus small kickboards instead. The kickboards took up almost no room and gave the kids something to hold onto while they were in the water.

Clothes are the category where we still refuse to pack lightly.

We plan for roughly three outfits per child per day.

That sounds excessive until you meet a two-year-old with a snack and a strong commitment to independence.

The difference now is that a complete change of clothes also lives in the go-bag that stays with our stroller. We learned that having extra clothes in the hotel room is considerably less useful when the mess occurs somewhere that is not the hotel room.

For entertainment, we went the opposite direction.

We brought almost no toys.

Each child got a favorite stuffed animal and we brought a few books. That was basically it.

The more we travel, the more obvious it becomes that we spend very little time sitting in the hotel room trying to entertain them.

Our new snack system

We also simplified food.

Our kids still tend to prefer actual food to packaged snack food, so we brought things like bananas, apples, beef jerky and other easy foods that didn’t require us to fill the hotel refrigerator.

Anything that needed to stay cool traveled in a small insulated cooler bag with an ice pack.

That gave us an easy grab-and-go supply of snacks without having to find food every time somebody announced they were hungry — usually at the exact moment when finding food would be least convenient.

The room refrigerator also gave us space for the milk we still bring for them.

At two, they drink considerably less of it than they used to.

Another small but glorious reduction in luggage.

The room worked ridiculously well for our sleep setup

We stayed in a king room overlooking the pool.

Of every hotel room we’ve used with the floor bed so far, this was the easiest one to arrange.

We didn’t have to move furniture just to create a sleep zone.

There was enough open floor space to set the bed up comfortably, and we were even able to use some similarly sized couch cushions beside it to create additional room for the kids to roll around while they slept.

For families using a floor-sleeping setup — or simply families who want usable floor space for little kids — we would choose the king configuration again.

One king bed left substantially more open room than two beds would have for the way our family uses a hotel room.

The curtains were another tiny detail that mattered much more than it sounds like it should.

The room had layered, heavier curtains that made it quite dark during the day. Our kids sleep with blackout curtains at home, so getting the room dark enough for a daytime nap made the transition much easier.

They slept well.

That sentence alone can determine whether parents consider a hotel stay successful.

The pool was visible before we even unpacked

From the room, the kids could see the pool below — the view at the top of this page, and the first thing they found.

Which meant they immediately began announcing that we were going to “swim-swim.”

After nap, we did.

One of the surprisingly useful parts of the pool setup for us was having bathrooms available right there. We could swim, get the kids out, change them from swim diapers and wet clothes into regular clothes, throw the wet things into the stroller and keep moving.

We didn’t have to return to the room first.

With toddlers, eliminating one apparently insignificant trip upstairs can somehow save half your afternoon.

The unexpected toddler superpower of this hotel: empty space

The Westin has large event and banquet areas.

While those areas were open and unused during our stay, those broad interior spaces became something we hadn’t expected to find in a hotel: a place where two toddlers could just run.

One evening when it was cooler outside and they still had energy to burn, we let them sprint through an unused open area away from other guests.

They ran. They hid. They chased each other. They wore themselves out.

And we didn’t even have to leave the building.

That is not an amenity you’ll find highlighted on a hotel booking page.

For us, it was one of the most useful features in the building.

And then there was the lawn

Immediately outside the hotel was another thing we appreciated much more as parents than we would have before kids: open grass.

The kids could get outside, run around and climb the gentle slopes without us needing to manufacture an activity.

Again, this trip kept reinforcing the same idea.

The things making a hotel easy with toddlers aren’t always the things you’d think to search for when booking one.

Sometimes you just need somewhere safe and uncomplicated for them to move.

South Coast Plaza without loading everyone back into the car

The location was probably the biggest reason this stay worked so well for us.

A pedestrian route outside the hotel connected us over to South Coast Plaza.

That meant stroller, toddlers, mall.

No loading the car. No unloading the car.

No negotiating an intersection with two increasingly independent two-year-olds while also pushing a stroller.

We could simply walk over.

And once we were there, there was plenty to occupy them.

It is a very large mall, and at two, that scale is the entertainment: escalators, palms, and several hundred people to watch from a railing.

The mall is considerably more exciting when you’re two

We went to the Lego store.

The kids could actually play with Legos while we looked around, which made browsing with two toddlers considerably more realistic.

We found food they would eat.

They got ice cream — a major event in their current lives.

The balloon incident

And then there were the balloons.

At South Coast Plaza, the kids found these little animal balloons with weighted feet that let them essentially “walk” the balloon along the ground without it floating away.

They were obsessed.

They walked their new little animals all the way back toward the hotel, and somehow the balloons survived the rest of the trip.

Until checkout.

We were packing the car in front of the Westin when August removed one of the weighted feet.

His balloon immediately headed for the ceiling structure above the valet area.

The Westin staff could not have been nicer about what was objectively a very small family emergency.

They started bringing out tall ladders and trying to rescue it for him.

For a moment, it looked like the operation might actually work.

Then the balloon escaped the structure entirely and floated off into the sky.

August’s balloon was gone.

But because South Coast Plaza was right there, this story somehow got a happy ending.

We walked back over to the mall just as the balloon seller was beginning her shift and bought him another one before the drive home.

There are practical reasons we liked being able to walk to the mall.

And then there is the ability to execute an emergency replacement-balloon mission before leaving town.

We hadn’t considered that one when booking.

Centennial Farm was the kids’ favorite part

The next morning, we wanted to give them something that was entirely for them.

We found Centennial Farm near the fairgrounds, a short drive from the hotel during our visit.

We expected animals.

We did not expect to watch two baby goats enter the world.

While we were there, a mother goat gave birth to twins, and our twins got to see baby goats that were only minutes old.

There were chickens, sheep, goats, cows, calves and pigs.

There were also growing areas where the kids — and, honestly, we — could see how different crops grow.

Linda saw cotton growing on the plant for the first time.

The kids could move around, look at the animals and explore instead of constantly being asked to stand still or stay beside us.

They ran themselves completely out of energy.

Then they fell asleep on the drive back to the hotel.

And through some minor parenting miracle, we transferred both sleeping toddlers from the car to the room without waking them.

We will accept our award at any time.

What surprised us about this stay

We didn’t choose the Westin because we wanted a resort where we’d spend two days without leaving the property.

We chose it because we were visiting family in Newport Beach and needed a practical place to stay.

And that may be exactly why it worked so well.

The room accommodated the way our kids actually sleep.

We could get them outside without turning it into an excursion.

The pool was easy. There was indoor space where they could move.

South Coast Plaza was accessible on foot.

And when we did want a kid-centered morning, Centennial Farm gave us one nearby.

Nothing required an elaborate plan.

What we’d do the same next time

The thing we didn’t forget

Tipping cash.

After learning that lesson on an earlier trip, we actually had cash ready for the bell staff this time.

Growth.

And then, because apparently the universe requires balance, one of our toddlers launched his beloved balloon into the Westin ceiling on checkout morning.

You win some.

Would we go back?

The Westin South Coast Plaza wasn’t a trip where the hotel was the destination. That was exactly the point. With two-year-old twins, it gave us something we value more and more: a room that worked, places for them to move, a pool they loved, and enough within walking distance that we didn’t have to keep putting everyone back into the car.

At 14 months, travel felt like moving our entire life to another building. At two, we’re starting to feel like we’re actually traveling again.

We’d stay here with the twins again.

WBT Quick Notes