Packing for Peaceful Road Trips

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Our family recently spent three months traveling around the western U.S. in our trusty (and jam-packed) Honda Pilot. During that time, I estimate that we spent well over 100 hours in the car with our three children, including several 8 –10 hour driving stints. Miraculously, the kids now think of four or five hours in the car as no big deal.

“No big deal” doesn’t mean they’re super happy about it, however. Our kids (ages 12, 9, and 4) may be road-trip veterans, but they still moan and complain and ask how much longer we have to drive, pretty much every trip. (Sorry, no miracle cure for that one!)

We can talk up the benefits of travel until we’re blue in the face, but the truth is that being in the car all day isn’t much fun, for kids or adults. It helps to have some tools under your belt for when the whining sets in. Here are the things we’ve found most useful.

1. Audiobooks

If you have a kid who loves to read and can read in the car without getting carsick, count your lucky stars and pile up the books. We don’t have any of those kids. I can’t read for very long in the car, either. Thankfully, before we left on our trip, a friend bought us a subscription to Audible. We get one free audiobook download a month and can purchase others for reasonable prices. Awesome.

However, for our next stint of long travels, I will figure out a way to have each kid listen to his or her own audiobook with headphones. While the idea of listening to a book all together sounds great on paper, the reality is that the road noise is loud enough to make it difficult to hear sometimes, we have three kids of very different ages who enjoy different books, and as soon as someone interrupts the story to ask a question, all heck breaks loose. So audiobooks, definitely yes. Just be aware that you may have to adjust how you use them, depending on your family dynamics.

2. Paper and Pencils

On one of our stops, a friend gave us a bag of car activities, which included some tiny little blank notebooks. I handed one to our nine-year-old, and kept one for myself, and we wrote and passed notes back and forth for a good hour. She’s always been a reluctant writer, so it got her writing, we got some bonding in, and the “secret” nature of it kept her interested. Sometimes we wrote questions and answers, and sometimes we wrote a story together, each of us writing one sentence at a time.

Our four-year-old wanted in on it, too, so I passed him notes with some simple words to read. They loved it. Kids can write notes to each other, too. Nothing but paper and a writing utensil needed. So simple.

(You could save some trees and do the same thing with a dry erase board or something, but half the fun for the kids was unfolding the note. At least we made sure to recycle our paper.)

3. Prayers and Songs

We’ve said and sung prayers in the car since the kids were tiny, so it’s a natural way for us to spend travel time. We let each person choose something to sing, and they can choose to sing it alone or with everyone together.

The car is also a great place for the whole family to practice memorizing prayers or passages from holy writings. We play a game where I read a prayer or passage a few times, then I say just the first few words and see if the kids can say the word that comes next. I keep going through the whole thing, leaving out every fourth word or so. It’s a great way for everyone to memorize, and the kids enjoy the challenge of trying to remember what word comes next.

4. Electronics

We have a smattering of iPads, Kindles, iPods, etc. that our kids pass around in the car. Yes, it does feel like a bit of a cop-out, but my feeling is that when you’re stuck in the car all day, sanity trumps sanctimony.

We have pretty stingy limits when it comes to screen time on a normal day, but on long road trips, I let the kids use electronics to their hearts’ content (or until the batteries die, whichever happens first). Our iPads have been our best travel companions, quickly followed by the DVD player. When the DVD player went kaput, I propped up my laptop between the front seats, and that worked just as well for watching movies. On a 10-hour road trip, electronics are a total sanity-saver.

5. Magazines

As I mentioned, we have too many carsickness issues to read books in the car, but children’s magazines seem to be another story. Kids’ magazines usually have short snippets of reading material, which is much more conducive to car reading. And most have activities kids can do, too, which kills time and makes up for some of the brain-drain of the screen time binges. Plus, most magazines are a bit more disposable in nature than a book, so you don’t care as much when they end up stuck to the bottom of the car floor with gum, crumbs, and dirty footprints all over them. (That’s not just our car, right?)

6. Maps

Maybe it’s because we just covered 7,000 miles of the U.S., but our kids loved looking at the road atlas to see where we were, where we’d been, and where we were going. We highlighted our trip route as we went, and it was immensely satisfying for them to see our travels on paper. Thanks to our “Stack the States” app (seriously awesome app), they even enjoyed just flipping through the various state maps and seeing where the capitals were, etc. The geography they’ve learned is impressive. Even our four-year-old is a map maven now.

7. Food

This one’s obvious, but there’s a wisdom to certain food choices while traveling. Sitting in the car all day can make your digestion a bit sluggish, so we try to keep snacks healthy and simple and fiber-filled. A small cooler, if you have room for it, expands the options beyond chips and crackers. Our kids’ favorites are grapes, apple slices, sugar snap peas, and yogurt cups (if your kids aren’t too messy, or your car is already so messy that you don’t care about a few yogurt drips).

But the real key to happy travelers is an unexpected treat every once in a while. Gum seems to keep our kids busy for a while, and also helps with the ear-popping through the mountains. And an occasional candy or other sweet is a great reward for the patience and perseverance required to sit in a car for hours on end. In fact, get yourself some treats, too, while you’re at it. You deserve them as much (if not more) than the kids.

8. Towels

In a moment of unexpected genius, I draped a beach towel over the back of each person’s seat before we left on our road trip. This was mainly a way to save space in the back of the car, but it turned out to be quite useful. They can use the towel as a blanket if they get cold, fold it or roll it to use as a lumbar pillow, or roll it up in the top of the car window to use as a sun shade. Such a simple item, but so many uses.

9. Praise

When the kids are quiet and peaceful, it’s easy to ignore them (while holding your breath for fear of disturbing the beautiful silence). But being quiet and peaceful on an all-day road trip, even for just a short part of it, is pretty impressive for a kid. Ten hours in a car is a psychological feat as much as a physical one, and praising kids during the times they’re handling it well is motivating. A simple, “You guys are really doing great with not complaining!” can really boost the kids’ spirits and give them a sense of accomplishment. It also helps you realize that there really are moments of bliss during the trials of car travel with children. A little bit of praise, and everyone wins.

10. Patience

Even with all the greatest, Pinterest-worthy travel tips on Earth, families are not always going to be perfectly content in the car together. People’s backs and bottoms will hurt. People’s personal space will be invaded. People will get queasy on windy roads. People will be bored, tired, hungry, and need to go to the bathroom. People will ask how long until you’re going to get to your destination, even if they can tell time and you’ve told them how long it will be.

I try to remember that however long it feels for me, it probably feels at least twice as long for the kids. Remember how time went by so much more slowly when you were little? Well it crawls by in the car. So a little complaining, whining, and bickering is to be expected. That’s when I pull out my silliness. I flip my hair over my face and put my glasses on like Cousin It from The Addams Family. Or I start a dramatic lip synch concert. Or I get totally base and make silly snorting, slurping, or spitting noises. Whatever it takes to not turn around and lecture my kids about how much better they have it in the car than I did at their age.

Not that I haven’t done that. But I try.

Being prepared for traveling with kids can make any family road trip more fun and less challenging. It may not go perfectly, but it should go more peacefully.

 

Annie Reneau is a homeschooling mom of three, lover of chocolate and travel, and former assistant editor with Brilliant Star. She now works as associate editor at Upworthy/GOOD and shares her personal musings on life and parenting at Motherhood and More.

 

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Updated on 12.06.13