Mindy Kaling’s Unexpected Hack for Getting Over Jet Lag—Plus Her Sweet Tip for Parents Traveling Without Their Kids

Though travel looks a bit different these days for Mindy Kaling—now mom to a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 1-year-old—she still has a few tricks up her sleeve from her solo travel days. Her best tip for dealing with jet lag? Get off the plane and go to a store. “I went to Paris a couple months ago for Fashion Week, and my love of shopping outweighs my love of sleep. And so I just made an appointment to go to the Paris Flea Market right after I arrived, and I just made myself get up and go, and it cured it instantly,” she told Travel + Leisure earlier this month. 

Kaling has quite the toolkit to survive travel, plus an adorable tip for parents on the go. We caught up with the writer, producer, and actress to talk about all her smart travel hacks and why her new hotel partnership brings her back to her childhood in New England. 

Though you would think the glamorous Emmy nominee, who just wore custom Harbison Studios and Marco Bichego jewelry to the Met Gala earlier this month, would only dine at the fanciest of restaurants when she travels, Kaling prefers to bring her own snacks. “When I’m going to a place, especially if there’s a hotel, I often don’t need an elaborate room service meal three times a day. It isn’t that unexpected, but I bring like 20 granola bars with me. And, also, if I can check it in, I’ll even bring little protein drinks, because I am in my 40s. I have whatever trendy protein drink packed in my suitcase,” she told T+L. 

The creator of The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever, and the new Kate Hudson show, Running Point, is clearly an incredible storyteller. When she travels for work, she records bedtime stories—self-composed, of course—for her young children that they can listen to before they go to sleep. “I come up with my own story because they know that I’m a writer. At the end of a day of writing stories for TV, I have to come up with personalized stories for them every single night.”

But when she does get to travel with the kids, she is a typical mom entertaining the two older children with iPads (it’s one of the few times they get their screens) and walking the youngest up and down the aisle to fall asleep as she carries her. She does miss the days when she would get to the airport only a few minutes before boarding. Before her children, she said, “I just wanted to be able to walk straight from my car through security and run on to the plane. But with children, there’s so much unexpected delaying and having to go to the bathroom, and ‘my shoelaces are untied’ or ‘I dropped my backpack and everything fell out of it.’ One downgrade of having children is how much extra time I have to allow to go to the airport.”

Even though traveling with young children is always full of challenges, Kaling is willing to fly cross-country with her brood this summer to take them to the brand-new Great Wolf Lodge Mashantucket in Connecticut. Kaling has partnered with the family resort on the grand opening of their 23rd location in North America. As a Cambridge native who now resides in Los Angeles, the New England resort holds a special place in her heart. “Just growing up in New England, it was the place where you wanted to go for your birthday. It really triggered some great memories for me when they asked me to be part of this. And I also was just, selfishly, really excited to try all the rides before everyone else.”

Kaling said for scaredy-cats like her, there are plenty of less-adventurous slide options. She can’t wait to take the kids, and though there is a Great Wolf Lodge in Anaheim, she thinks this new property is worth the trek. “Trying to find something super fun where I can literally park in one place is ideal. This is so much more fun than other kinds of trips we’ve taken them on. Plus, the cabanas are sick!”