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How I Overcame Pregnancy Nausea and Enjoyed Our Family Road Trip

Not one vomit bag was used on our route through South Dakota and Colorado

Our family recently road-tripped through South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska — but beforehand, we made a big announcement. Our third and final embryo transfer was successful, and we’re expecting our second child in November!

To reach this moment, we navigated a suspenseful final round of IVF, a joyous and nauseous first trimester, and our first road trip with Baby #2 (nicknamed Biggler #2). It’s been a hopeful whirlwind. We know pregnancy is far from a guarantee for couples with infertility, let alone the chance to choose how many kids you’ll have. We’ve stumbled and sobbed our way through, but we made it to our goal. We’re still astonished.

As I take on my second trimester, I’m excited to celebrate through my favorite lens: travel. To start, I can share what I’ve learned about mitigating morning sickness, or pregnancy nausea, and enjoying time on the road. Of course, since every pregnancy is unique, it’s always a good idea to ask your doctor if you have questions or concerns before setting off on an adventure.

Setting the Scene: Our Route and My Symptoms

For me, Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre was the perfect venue to see a show while pregnant. We went to see Rilo Kiley in May of 2025.

Another exciting announcement inspired the route for our trip. In January, Rilo Kiley — my favorite band — announced a reunion tour, and I lost my mind in a sea of excitement and uncertainty. As you might recall, IVF is the recurring trickster in my travel story, rearing its head repeatedly to create complications and question marks. In this case, the questions came from multiple angles. Would I be pregnant during the entire tour? Would I be pregnant at all? What would the full tour route look like? What venue would be most appropriate for a pregnant concert viewing? Because there was no way I would miss this.

After some trial and error (and an extra pair of tickets bought and sold), we landed on Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver. On the way, we would trek through South Dakota to visit Reptile Gardens with our toddler and see the Badlands. It was a grand plan, but not without its obstacles: Namely, constant nausea.

During my first pregnancy, nausea and vomiting were a predictable constant right up until our daughter was born. I expected no less during my second pregnancy, but I wound up with even more discomfort. At my worst, I threw up four times in one day, lost some weight, and went to urgent care for fluids. At that point, the trip was on the line (Jenny Lewis reference intended).

The medications I had taken during my previous pregnancy — Metoclopramide and Famotidine, primarily — were ineffective against my worsening nausea. Remedies like ginger and constant snacking helped, but not nearly enough. However, a couple of weeks before the trip, I finally found a routine that stabilized me and made travel possible.

Central to the plan was Unisom (or doxylamine succinate), a sleep aid that takes the edge off nausea while also, predictably, making you sleepy. To keep my slumbering heart at bay (yes, still intended), I began taking half a pill mid-morning with Vitamin B6 along with another half pill in the late afternoon. This doesn’t eliminate my nausea, but it does help quite a bit.

With Unisom as my shield, we hit the road in mid-May and headed off toward spectacular views (last one). Here’s what went well and what I would have done differently.

What I Did Right

We visited Badlands National Park for the first time as a family with our two-year-old daughter in May of 2025.

Ate a High-Protein Hotel Breakfast

As a vegetarian, eggs are one of my go-to sources of protein. And they’ve been a lifesaver during my second pregnancy. There is evidence suggesting protein is easier to digest in the first trimester, and that choosing high-protein options can reduce nausea. In my experience, this has been true. When we planned our trip, we only booked hotels with breakfast, and we looked for photos with eggs. Protein aside, we prioritized breakfast and snacks throughout the trip. It can be tempting to hit the road early and skip a sit-down meal, or travel light without messy food in the car. But pregnancy nausea is often exacerbated by an empty stomach. We didn’t take that chance.

Enjoyed the Outdoors (w/o Overdoing It)

I’m so glad we chose an outdoor venue to see Rilo Kiley, let alone the gorgeous and legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre. The fresh air helped keep my nausea at bay, even in the surprisingly chilly temperatures we encountered. During the first half of our trip, heat was our main concern, as temperatures neared 100 degrees. Despite the heat, I have no regrets about our outdoor explorations at Reptile Gardens, Badlands National Park, and Dinosaur Ridge. We made sure to wear hats, apply sunscreen, and take frequent breaks. With these precautions in place, I believe the exercise, fresh air, and change of scenery helped keep my stomach steady.

Packed Comfortable Clothes

I had no qualms about breaking into my maternity clothes even before Week 15, when we took off. Our trip involved more than one long leg of driving, and I spent those hours in the comfort of soft, stretchy maternity shorts. I also packed lightweight, flowy dresses, a maternity skort, comfortable bras, and an assortment of short-sleeved shirts. I do wish I had packed warmer clothes for the concert but, otherwise, this wardrobe was spot on.

What I Would Do Differently

We spotted what appeared to be a mother and baby buffalo running alongside the road as we drove through Custer State Park in South Dakota during our trip in May of 2025.

Drink More Water

This is a constant struggle for me during pregnancy. Water triggers my nausea — especially more than just a sip or two at a time. But dehydration is a serious concern. On the road, we ended up facing a dehydration-related scare. I was tipped off by a symptom that turned out to be pretty common during travel, even in early pregnancy: swelling ankles and feet. At the time, my mind went straight to the pre-eclampsia I previously experienced. We took my blood pressure at a Wal-Mart en route, and it came back pretty high. My OB’s office assured me that it was too early to worry about pre-eclampsia, and they advised me to watch for worsening symptoms. Luckily, the issue didn’t worsen, and it mostly cleared up by the time I got home, although I’m still monitoring my blood pressure. Dehydration can impact blood pressure, so I’m doing my best to avoid it. To keep fluids down on the road, I focused on beverages that triggered my nausea the least: ice cold water through a straw, 7Up Zero, and orange juice, among others. Looking back, I also wish I had traveled with my own blood pressure cuff (ideally, calibrated at the doctor’s office).

Plan Short Driving Days

I come from a family of jam-packed travel itineraries. But with a toddler, my goal is usually to rein in this habit. This was especially true planning a trip during pregnancy. We did a pretty good job balancing our daily activities, but in order to save money on hotels, we ended up planning a couple of days with 8+ hours of driving. This turned out to be excessive. Looking back, I would bite the bullet while pregnant and spend a little extra on hotels to avoid at least one of those long days. Six hours of driving seems to be the ideal limit for us.

Make Time for the Pool

I love being in the water, so I’m very at home in a hotel pool. But on this trip, we simply didn’t plan enough day time at the hotel to relax. I was usually too tired or nauseated at the end of the day to take a dip. Swimming can be a great form of exercise in pregnancy (as long as you’re already acclimated). And time in the water is relaxing. In the future, I’ll set aside more time to enjoy this amenity with my toddler.

Why We Traveled to Disney in the Middle of IVF

A chapter in our story of secondary infertility and parenting

IVF comes with lots of questions, heartbreaks, needle pricks, and hopefully — eventually — a few triumphs. But it also comes with calendars. For fertility patients, conflicting calendars swirl around day-in and day-out, refusing to play nice and creating chaos. For me, one of the most difficult challenges of infertility has been learning to grasp all these calendars and weave them into a workable arrangement. Through this challenge, I’ve reinforced my belief in the importance of taking adventures, even when the calendars in my life say “no”.

Let’s take these calendars one at a time. For starters, there are the typical calendars: day-to-day plans, work schedules, holidays. These calendars alone sometimes dominate my life. From there, you have the more theoretical, long-term calendars. Rough timelines of future events, like buying a new house, or moving to a new city. Growing your family. Taking your daughter to Disney World for the first time.

Finally, there’s the IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) calendar. This one is a bit more concrete. Our fertility doctor sends us literal calendar files that detail when to start and stop certain medications and injections, when to go in for ultrasounds and blood draws, and the tentative dates for the big moments during IVF: egg retrieval and embryo transfer. There’s a bit of flexibility, but, if all goes well, the schedule is mostly fixed.

Those who have gone through infertility might recognize this combination of McDonalds fries, cozy socks, and a pineapple icon. All three are symbols of good luck associated with a successful embryo transfer.

The trouble is, there’s actually one more calendar at play: the overarching, unknowable calendar of the body. We all do our best to guess what this calendar might look like. Our clinic prescribes certain hormones at certain times to try and chart a course. But my body often responds in unpredictable ways. When this happens, another IVF calendar comes off the refrigerator and goes into the recycling bin, and we end up finding a way to fit the new one around the other plans we’ve carefully balanced. We’ve been doing this, again and again, for years.

Once, those calendars aligned with the stars and gave us our daughter. Subsequent pregnancy calendars and breastfeeding calendars eventually led to a new set of more abstract calendars. We started imagining all the adventures we would take with her. Her first time at the ocean, the apple orchard, the aquarium, the zoo, the science center…she was pretty young for all of these, but we had no regrets whatsoever. We had spent years daydreaming about these firsts, and we wasted no time starting to live those dreams.

For me, Disney World was among the most important adventures. Disney recurs again and again in my life, marking various milestones. It was my family’s first big road trip when I was eleven years old and one of the catalysts for my love of travel. The next year, we took a road trip with a stop at Disneyland. I returned to Florida with my high school’s music program and eventually went back as part of the Disney College Program in 2008. That year, I spent four months working long, hot shifts at ice cream carts and pretzel stands in Animal Kingdom…and I still managed to come away loving Disney. Years later, my husband and I returned for the first few days of our honeymoon. We even spent a day at Disneyland Paris in 2017.

It’s me! I’m absolutely loving our family’s first trip to Disney World in 1998. We visited in December, and I remember a “snowstorm” of suds that we danced in at one of the parks. This is a photo from that night.

So, it felt natural to start planning our daughter’s first trip to Disney on the early side. These plans were accelerated by another looming series of calendars. In late 2023, we started a new IVF cycle, in hopes of welcoming a new baby in 2025. This left us with a choice: Do Disney right away, in the middle of IVF, or wait until pregnancy, the newborn days, or later still. To me, it made the most sense to create that memory without delay, rather than postponing indefinitely until the most convenient time. After all, that’s the philosophy that led to the creation of this blog.

And I believe we made the right call. At home after the trip, it’s clear that our daughter’s brain lit up with new connections in Florida. She’s communicating with us more every day, and she’s pointing out an increasing number of things in her environment with even more curiosity than before.

We also created some major memories for all the big people, including my dad, who joined us and spent some dedicated bonding time with our daughter. These memories are already buoying me through our preparations for the next round of IVF injections.

We made the right choice taking the trip, but that doesn’t mean it was straightforward. The calendars in our lives did their best to befuddle our adventure. The easiest way share this part of the story is with a timeline:

December 2023: We prepare for a new cycle of IVF and start planning Disney
Early January 2024: We start the new cycle and book our first set of Disney dates
Mid-January: A cyst on my ovary stops our cycle dead in its tracks
Days Later: A second ultrasound confirms the cyst hasn’t resolved
Late January: We start a new cycle and deliberate over a new set of Disney dates that won’t interfere with our revised IVF calendar — or other, theoretical IVF calendars, in case this one also goes wrong
Early February: We change our Disney and flight dates to the only week in March that makes sense financially and practically — unfortunately, it’s Spring Break. If our cycle goes well, we’ll be finished with our egg retrieval, and we’ll take a natural pause during the trip. If the cycle is delayed again, we might end up traveling while I’m on birth control to prepare for a new cycle. This is doable, but not ideal, because I sometimes experience annoying side effects. We cross our fingers.
Mid-February: The cyst is still there, but smaller. We move forward with injections.
Late February: Our cycle is canceled. My ovaries create too few follicles, or spaces for eggs to grow. We’re devastated.
Early March: We wait to see when my next period will start. If it starts before Disney, I’ll need to take birth control on the trip (downside), but we’ll get to move forward with our next cycle more quickly when we return home (upside).
Five Days Before Disney: My period starts. We hurry in for an appointment and start our next cycle the day before we get on the plane.
Mid-March: We head to Disney! I take my birth control every night before bed in an attempt to avoid side effects…and it works!
Late March: We return home, prepare for another round of injections, and cross our fingers.

As you can imagine, this timeline was fraught with moments of anxiety and sadness between the major bullet points. More than once, we considered canceling the trip altogether. Worse still, we worried that this second attempt at IVF would ultimately fail. It was clear throughout our planning that we needed to prepare for all outcomes, both practically and emotionally.

Our Disney World honeymoon in 2016, complete with our “Happily Ever After” button!

To prepare practically, I researched all the fine print associated with rescheduling or canceling both our Disney dates and our flights, and I wasn’t surprised at all when that information came in handy. Both changes involved a lengthy phone conversation, but I walked away successful, having spent less than $200 extra for a new itinerary with one day added.

In terms of emotional preparations, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are some outcomes that will inevitably engulf you, regardless of how you steel yourself. Travel is a strategy I use to mitigate the waves of inevitable emotion throughout IVF. This time around, I obsessed over Disney restaurant reservations, ideal ride itineraries, and the nuances of Disney’s Genie + service rather than focusing all that energy on my unpredictable body. For the most part, the distraction worked. I put on a pair of Minnie ears, took my daughter’s hand, and we tackled the messy world with as much wonder as possible, while all the unknowns came our way.

How Las Vegas Taught Our Family to “Go Anyway”

“What happens in Vegas…? No really, I’m actually asking. I’m traveling with a baby, and I have no idea what to expect.”
If this sounds like you, read on!

Ten months into my first ecstatic and terrifying year as a parent, breast pumps in hand, I found myself tucked away in a Las Vegas casino restroom. Reflected in the long row of mirrors in front of me, a cluster of pink-feathered showgirls touched up their makeup and fixed their costumes, unaware or unconcerned as I stood off to the side, catching snippets of conversation. With only their gossip to distract me, I did my best to keep my nursing cover in place and watched the minutes tick by. I had pumped in a lot of strange places, but the casino was (fittingly) a new winner.

Fast forward several months, and you’ll find me here at my keyboard, equipped with a wealth of information about making do when family-friendly amenities and breastfeeding accommodations are hard to find. Throughout my first year of motherhood, I pumped at casinos, airports, parks, and restaurants in Nevada, Missouri, Nebraska, Florida, Minnesota, and across my home state of Iowa. I deeply immersed myself in the pros and cons of traveling while breastfeeding, traveling while pumping, and, eventually, traveling while keeping a toddler safe and fed.

Before my daughter was born, I also racked up several years’ experience navigating safe travel during infertility treatment — and a global pandemic. Moving forward, the learning will only continue. My husband and I are busy planning new trips, even as we dive back into IVF and care for our energetic toddler.

Now, I’m ready to share the mistakes I’ve made, the strategies I’ve learned so far, and even a few things I’ve gotten right. I’m hoping others can benefit from the philosophy my husband and I developed over the years: Go anyway. Take the trip you’re on the fence about, even if you aren’t sure yet how you’ll breastfeed at the airport or pump on the road.

Go anyway, even if there’s another IVF cycle on the horizon. For me, it’s almost always worth it. With some careful balancing and planning, I’ve always found the solutions I need to successfully combine travel, parenting, and infertility treatment, even if those solutions weren’t obvious at the outset. While I certainly don’t mean to imply that travel is easy or accessible for everyone, I do hope this blog can chip away at a few, small barriers and help families become more confident and informed.

And Las Vegas feels like the best place to start. This trip put our “go anyway” outlook to the test. I found myself repeatedly vexed as I searched for public lactation spaces, family restrooms, diaper changing stations, and stroller routes that wouldn’t require half a dozen elevators. So. Many. Elevators.

Then, when I returned, I was vexed to learn how many amenities we actually missed as we ventured down the Las Vegas Strip. Although I spent weeks planning and checking maps beforehand, there were still several family restrooms and changing stations that eluded us along the way. This trip challenged my stubborn belief that enough advanced planning can quell the unexpected. But it also affirmed the notion that having a plan is worth it, as long as you’re able to adapt.

Red Rock Canyon State Park was one of my favorite stops on our family trip to Las Vegas.

In the end, I was able to identify three, key elements that helped us along the way: choosing the right hotel, planning an itinerary with relatively family-friendly stops, and exploring destinations beyond the Las Vegas Strip. What would I do differently? I would do much more thinking on my feet and ask for help more often.

So, if you’re looking for the TL;DR on Vegas with a baby, the takeaways are as follows:

Choose the right hotel. One with a family-friendly vibe and a refrigerator-freezer combo for storing breastmilk and re-freezing your icepack (which you’ll need in the heat).
Think ahead about where you’ll pause to breastfeed and/or pump, and create a flexible plan that involves at least one pit stop back at home base.
Venture off the Strip to see the mountains and desert. For us, these stops were the most family-friendly and enjoyable.
Think on your feet. Don’t assume an amenity isn’t there just because it’s hard to find, or it didn’t pop up in your research. It isn’t always easy to find someone who can help, but asking might be worth it.

When it comes to locating amenities, it’s also worth noting that Nevada passed a law in 2017 requiring most new buildings to be equipped with one or more diaper-changing stations in restrooms for men and women. I’m not sure how much this impacts the casinos along the Strip, since it focuses on new construction and has some exceptions. But it’s an encouraging sign. Overall, I would love to see Las Vegas and Nevada embracing more changes like this: More public lactation spaces, more family restrooms, and more guidance to help traveling parents find both.

As things stand now, this post covers the basics, as I see them. But if you’re looking for more details, I’ve got you covered! Below, you’ll find my ranked list of attractions, including our favorites, like Hoover Dam, Red Rock Canyon State Park, and Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart.

In these posts, I’ve done my best to review the highs and lows when it comes to baby-friendliness, taking into account the missing amenities we discovered after the fact. I cover pumping, breastfeeding, changing diapers, getting around with a stroller, and, of course, having fun together as a family. I was exclusively pumping for my daughter during this trip, so my research leans in that direction, but I’ve done my best to provide a broad range of helpful information. So, here we go: