So, we just bought tickets for a trip to France this summer (hence that super-happy icon!), but we still need to figure out how we're getting from the airport to our island cottage. (Once we're on the island, we're exclusively traveling around on bicycles and generally not doing much travel, maybe taking the bus once.)
What seems like the most likely possibility is that we'll do a rental car for a day to get from the airport to the island. That begs the question, what do we do with the carseat issue?
My eldest will have his Radian that he'll sit in on the plane, which we would just install in the rental car, easy. My youngest is going to be a lap infant, though. (I know this is not ideal, but with the cost of international travel, we just can't afford to get him his own seat on the plane.)
So, for our youngest, our choices are:
-- Europcar does PROVIDE carseats... but we've been very very wary of rental car seats, and I'd worry that their 9 month - 2 year seat (as listed on their website) might not fit our gigantic baby (currently 4 months, 22 lbs, around 29", wearing 18-24 month clothing).
--We could check his seat (he's about to move out of the infant seat and into a still-to-be-determined convertible seat), but the impacts a seat might sustain when checked would make me nervous, too, especially with a more expensive forever seat.
--Alternatively, we were thinking of getting a cheap convertible seat for our youngest for the trip, perhaps leaving it in the box and then checking it as a big protective boxed-item to unpack at the airport and install in the rental car?
Any thoughts about these choices? And if the last option (buy a cheap seat for travel) - what exactly would be the best seat for our situation? Our youngest will be 7.5 months old at the time of the trip, so he definitely needs to RF in a convertible seat.