We recently went on a family road trip covering several thousand miles round trip. To say we spent a lot of time in the car together is an understatement! This was our first time undertaking a cross-country trip like this and, while we had fun and made lots of memories, we also learned many things! Here are a few tips that kept us going.
— Use your library ebook borrowing. Before the trip, I downloaded the library borrowing app to each of the kids’ tablets. Then they picked a few ebooks and audiobooks. It saved a lot of space to not have a box of actual books traveling with us!
— Check into free trial subscriptions. We knew we wouldn’t always have internet so I used a free trial of Spotify to download some ad free music to my phone. I could then connect it to the van’s system via Bluetooth. I also tried a free subscription to Scribd, which has ebooks, magazines, audiobooks, and more. It was great to have options not available at my library and it encouraged me to read more because I wanted to finish before the 30 days were up!
— Take snacks…but ration them. We bought lots of special snacks for this big trip. But my kids could have eaten them all in one day! So I packed most of them in a box in the trunk and kept just a sampling closer to me. When someone asked for a snack, I reminded them there were only so many within reach and when they were gone, no more snacks for the day.
— We only ate out for dinners. This was a huge money saver. We made sure to stay at hotels that served a breakfast and we had a cooler with sandwich fixings, crackers and peanut butter, and veggies for lunch. We would stop around noon and fill up with gas then locate a nearby park using Google and enjoy a picnic lunch. It gave the kids a chance to run and play before sitting in the car again and we found some neat parks in small towns across the US!
— Be flexible. We had a few hiccups on the trip but nothing major. Instead of stressing and allowing it to derail our attitudes, we adjusted and kept going! We ended up spending a day at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum that we hadn’t planned on and getting to one of the hotels a little earlier another day to allow for extra swim time in the pool.
— Pack surprises. Prior to the trip, I ordered sticker books, sticker mosaics, hand held {non electronic} games, coloring books, and quiet fidgets. I didn’t show them to the kids and wrapped each one, marking it as a shared present for all three or with their initials. Each day when we set out from the hotel, they could choose a present to open and enjoy.
— Limit screens. While the kids did have their tablets, we limited the time they could use them each day. Tommy had downloaded some movies to our Cloud but he only put one movie a day on their individual tablets. They also had a few games that didn’t require Internet. For the first stretch of the morning and for awhile after lunch, it was no tablets. They could sleep, look out the window, or do an activity they’d opened from me. Part of the afternoon was for audiobooks. It worked very well.
— Don’t think you can’t. I get it. With kids, car rides can seem very daunting. Everyone in a confined space for hours on end? Yikes! But if you prepare a little and keep a positive attitude, it can be a fun trip for the whole family. In fact, as we were on our final stretch home, having spent 65+ hours in the car in 13 days, our youngest said, “When are we doing a big trip in the car again?”
We are so privileged in America to be able to drive on good roads that get us to any part of our country! And what a variety of landscapes we have! We saw high desert, open farmland, lush treefilled scapes, miles and miles of flat land, rolling hills, big cities, small towns, mountains, mist covered hills, and windy roads. The planning, the hours, the miles we sat; it was all worth it and filled with memories for our family.
Photo by Derek Story on Unsplash