Rent car seats or check them in?

When you are traveling with kids and renting a car at another airport, do you take your car seats with you or do you rent them with your car? 

We travel a lot (back when we could travel) and have tried both options. Over time though, we have moved towards taking the car seats with us almost every trip. Now it's just a booster seat for the younger one and is not much trouble to check that in. 

First question for us has always been the cost. Is the airline going to charge for the extra check in bags? If so, then how does that cost compare with what the rental company is charging? If you are on any of the super budget airlines, make sure to read through their fine print and baggage size policies. 

Your 'status' with the rental car company is also another factor to consider. If you are used to regularly seeing your name up on the board with the car location and you just get in and drive out, then be prepared to spend some extra time at the airport getting car seats. I've never had a car ready to go with seats waiting for me with any rental company here or abroad. Once we even thought about taking the car and buying a seat at a local store while waiting for rental car folk to find us seats. 

If you are taking the car seats with you, you do have the option to take it on the aircraft if the kid has a seat booked. We have never tried this option, so I will leave it at that. I would definitely factor what all you are carrying through security and the airport (including kids and carry on bags) before adding another item to that list. 

If you are checking the car seat, here are some considerations: 

 - Protection: Some airlines bag the car seat. Some just load it as is. In heavy rain, we have had the seats come drenched out for an hour drive and the kids sat on those all the way. If you are flying into some locations (India for us), expect some dirt added to the mix. A car seat bag can help quite a bit (link to the one we use below).

 - Baggage Claim: At some airports, car seats will come out on a different baggage belt along with special items. Just ask at the baggage service desk of your airline if you get your other bags first and not your car seats.   

 - Carrying the Seats: It is usually a short haul from car to check in and baggage to rental car. However with 2 kids and quite a few other bags, we often found ourselves short handed. Kids are usually quite helpful at the beginning of a trip, but quite a handful towards the end of the trip! Again a car seat bag can help with extra straps and even shoulder straps to carry like a backpack. See how it fits in your overall bags and kids carry scheme. What goes on whose shoulder or roller suitcase. 

This is the only carry bag we ever tried. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M2A4IK1/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1). Not the best looking one, just a big nylon bag. By the time we decided to get a car seat bag, we just had one infant seat and one booster seat. Both fit into one bag. The sheer size of it looked odd on my back, but it was lightweight with the seats in it. 

A million to fourty five thousand...

Once heard a Planet Money episode that covered how once the big banks took over local banks, in many places black farmers started getting their loan applications rejected or delayed and slowly had to sell their farmland and leave. Farming is a loan heavy activity. You take loans, plant, and pay off after harvest - every year. 

This guardian article covers one farmers overall experience. John Boyd Jr. bought his first farm for $51,000 at age 18 in 1984.. 

"In subsequent visits, the loan officer told Boyd he better learn to talk to him like other black folks did, took naps during meetings, threw Boyd’s applications straight into the trash and spat his chewing tobacco on Boyd’s shirt, claiming to have missed his spittoon."

Year 2019: "To avoid being docked – getting priced down for moisture or debris in the bushels – he will ask his wife, Kara Brewer Boyd, to enlist her white stepfather to sell the beans for him. When the other man takes Boyd’s beans, he’s not docked but complimented."

“The land don’t know color. The land never mistreated me, people do.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/why-have-americas-black-farmers-disappeared?fbclid=IwAR0JOFwya2W1d8AHDeTeLDDuD1OalnZ-BjS3Tkobt28myKUSekVa7xUCkaw

How things come home...

Remember all the colds we used to catch before this? It's all gone now. Looking back, there used to be only two ways something came home.

 - couple days after a trip, I start feeling something in my throat or nose, becomes a cold, everyone gets it. 

 - one of the kids fall sick first, then everyone gets it. 

No travel, no school, no colds! 

Our small school district has around 7000+ individuals including students and staff. That 7000 could go back directly to anywhere from 14,000 to 35,000 people depending on how many kids from a household are in school, how many grandparents live around here etc. And the population of our city is 40,000. That's how schools connect people! 

 

The 2nd Wave

The initial outbreak in Wuhan was so tightly clamped down that we never got to know how it was managed. But back in June, there were big headlines everywhere about a  a "2nd wave in China".

What happened with that?
Nothing!

This time the information flow was not restricted and we can look back and see what was done. Beijing is a city of 20 million people.

After the initial Wuhan outbreak time lock-downs, cases in Beijing went down to zero. Everything opened back up. They had a 55 day streak with 0 new cases. Then 35 new cases were found on the first day of this outbreak.
 - it was very easy to identify the source - a wholesale sea food market.
 - neighborhoods using the market were put in lock-down.
 - everyone was tested quickly using batch testing (more on batch testing below).
 - based on test results, further targeted lock-downs were imposed while everything else was back open to normal business
 - total cases in this outbreak - 335!

This is one place where fundamental democracy vs. authoritarian styles may come into play. Both USA and India are doing a pretty bad job with virus management. India at least has the ability to perform China style lock-downs, but that definitely will not work in the USA.
 - Both USA and India opened everything back up just as cases were going up in most places and never got under control.
 - We cannot do batch testing in both places because again we never got to the fully controlled state  and positive rates are very high.

Batch testing example: 

 - you take all the samples from an apartment block and do a single test. If negative, move on.

 - if positive, test floor by floor samples in a single test...etc.