The NJEA Convention Weekend: New Jersey's Best-Kept Travel Hack

Why This Weekend, Specifically

NJ public school families: if you check your district calendar for early November, you'll see Thursday and Friday off, almost always. The specific dates shift slightly year to year (this coming fall it's the 5th and 6th in our district), but the pattern holds. It's a teacher convention, not a federal holiday, which is the whole reason airfare doesn't price like a holiday weekend. People in Texas and Ohio aren't flying anywhere, because their kids are in school. We get a four-day window with shoulder-season pricing and a regular work week's worth of childcare baked in.

I've watched this weekend get absorbed into chores and birthday parties for years. I'm here to tell you: stop. Use it.

What a Munich Long Weekend Actually Looks Like

We fly out of Newark Wednesday night. The kids sleep on the plane (Leo could sleep through a brass band; Ella takes longer but eventually folds). We land Thursday morning, drop bags at the apartment we rent in Schwabing, and head straight to the Englischer Garten for the kids to run off the flight. There's a playground near the Chinesischer Turm that has saved me on five separate trips.

• Thursday afternoon: Walk through the Hofgarten, light lunch somewhere near the Residenz, kids in bed by 7
• Friday: Brigitte's apartment for breakfast. Her daughter and Ella vanish into a bedroom with markers. Dave and Brigitte's husband talk about football neither of them really watches.
• Saturday: The Bauers. Frau Bauer makes a *Streuselkuchen* the size of a tire. Herr Bauer asks Leo serious engineering questions about his stuffed elephant.
• Sunday: One museum, one big lunch, one pretzel each, fly home overnight.

If Munich Isn't Your Thing

The same logic works for anywhere with a 5-7 hour flight from EWR. Two we've done and would do again:

• Iceland. Reykjavik in early November is dark by 4:30 PM, which sounds bad and is actually wonderful with small kids. Pool culture saves a rainy afternoon. Icelandair routinely has the best NJEA-weekend fares I've seen.
• Lisbon. Still warm enough for a park afternoon. Pasteis de nata at every corner. The kids treat the trams like rides.

I'd skip Paris and London for this particular weekend — they're charming year-round and you can get them on any school holiday. The point of the NJEA window is that you're getting four days when nobody else is going anywhere, and the airfare reflects that. Use it on the city you wouldn't otherwise justify.

The Logistics That Actually Matter

One thing I've learned: book the return flight overnight on Sunday, not Monday morning. Monday-morning returns out of Europe land you home at noon and ruin two days. The Sunday-night red-eye gets you back in time to drop the kids at school Monday like nothing happened. Dave does a half-day from home and nobody at his office is the wiser.

Pack a real meal for the flight over — not an airport sandwich, an actual sealed container of something the kids will eat. Munich's Hauptbahnhof has a Vinzenz Murr counter for the airport-train layover that has rescued more than one tantrum.

The first year we did this, my mother-in-law asked if we were okay financially because we kept "flying around in November." We are. The flights were $480 round-trip per adult.

What the Kids Actually Get Out of It

I'm not going to pretend a 4-year-old has cohesive memories of a Munich November. Leo doesn't. What he has is the *texture* of it — that there's a place where the streetcars ring, where his elephant has a German cousin (a small stuffed badger Frau Bauer pressed on him last year), where the grown-ups speak a language he understands fragments of. That texture is what builds. By the time he's eight, those fragments will be a place. By the time he's fifteen, they'll be a relationship.

Ella, at six, is already there. She knows where the U-Bahn entrance is by Marienplatz. She knows that *Quark* is yogurt's tangier cousin. She knows that Brigitte's daughter has a bedroom with a star projector. She is, in the small accumulating way kids do this, building a second city in her head. The November weekend is one of the bricks.