Day 30 – phil&teds Dash Stroller

We’ve been selling phil&teds strollers since the very beginning in 2004. Back then, I ordered them directly from New Zealand (loved their accents), and hardly anyone had ever heard of them. We were one of just a handful of retailers in the United States. Now, of course, they’re all the rage, and I’m a proud mother hen. I used the phil&teds e3 (an older model) with my girls when they were 1 and 3 years old. We traveled all over the place with that stroller, but it was our first trip that was most memorable.

For our first family vacation after Mira was born, my in-laws invited us to the Bahamas. It was January of 2005, and we were excited to get out of Boston and take a break after working incredibly hard through our first holiday season. It had been a stressful few months, and we needed a nice, relaxing break. Alas, that was not to be.

The morning before we were scheduled to leave, weather forecasts started calling for a blizzard the following day. Eager to outsmart the weather, I called and changed our flights – to that afternoon. Having never packed a family of four, I had grossly underestimated the chaos factor, and it was a very rough day. We stopped at the store on the way to the airport (running late, naturally) and picked up our shiny, new phil&teds stroller. We made our flight, which was basically a miracle, and thought, with the bad weather behind us, we were all good.

At our stopover in Miami, we waited on the jetway for our stroller. And waited. And waited. And nearly missed our connection because that stroller never showed up. Racing through the airport with our bags, a cranky baby, and a tired toddler, we were the last ones at the gate. As they hustled us aboard, the gate agents were suspiciously tight-lipped about the whereabouts of our stroller, saying vaguely that it would probably meet us at our destination. After we landed in paradise, we were finally told it had been completely destroyed. How? I have no idea, they wouldn’t even show it to me (I might have seemed a little unbalanced by then, but it had been a long day).

This is where owning Magic Beans came in handy. I convinced the airline to fly us a new stroller, and asked one of our warehouse guys to drop one off at Logan Airport. A few hours later, we were plus one stroller. I wish I could say that the stroller drama was the worst of that trip, but it wasn’t. Both kids got sick (really sick), then I got sick (a little sick), and then Eli’s grandmother died. It was basically a disaster, but I got to swim with dolphins, which was nice.

Since then, I’ve had a few vacations much better than that one, and phil&teds has retired the e3 and replaced it with 4 new models. The Dash, today’s giveaway, is my favorite one. Enter to win.

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