With summertime officially kicking off for us, we will be hitting the road soon to visit family. We travel by car A LOT and have since the kids have been born. We live 4 & 8 hours away from Ben’s family, so that’s meant plenty of road trips for us. I’m also a big flying weenie, so if we could possibly drive, I will try and make it happen! We drove to Disney, and subsequently down the Florida coast at Christmas (and logged 24 hours doing it 🙂 We’re definitely not travel pros, but I wanted to share a few quick tips that help us when we travel with our kiddos.
1.Pack road snacks. I’m not even ashamed to admit it – but I’m a total nerd when it comes to packing our car. I actually ENJOY it. We have a cloth cooler bag that we use at the beach, and I fill it with ice packs and pack road snacks for long trips. BUT I just bought a Packit Freezable lunch bag that works without ice packs, so I’m excited to try that! I usually pack baggies of fruit, yogurt pouches, Kids Clif Bars, cheese sticks, and gummies. I try to also get ‘different’ kinds of snacks – things we normally don’t buy – to switch it up and make it fun for the kids. This always lessens the amount of stops we need to make, and saves us some money along the way. It also helps us eat a little healthier on the road 🙂
2. Pack ‘fun’ baggies. I CANNOT remember who I got this idea from, but it was genius. For especially long road trips, I make little $5 fun baggies for the kids. I buy $1 items from the Target dollar aisle, or from Five Below, and pack each kid a ‘baggie’ full of cheap car entertainment. They don’t know about it in advance, and we usually wait until they are just about to run out patience to give it to them 🙂 I usually choose little car appropriate items (no slim, playdough, etc), and that might include a little doll, finger game, book, etc. I’ve been doing this for several years and it works great! We do have a DVD player in our car that we use as a last resort and we try to make it as long as we can without using it. I grew up in the backseat of a car with my brother drawing ‘lines’ we couldn’t cross to touch each other. We counted fence posts and cars, so my kids can learn to entertain themselves too 🙂 HAHA!
3. Reduce the clutter. Ya’ll, my car is a HOT MESS most of the time, but I always try to clean it really good before a road trip. It stresses me out traveling for long periods of time in a really cluttered car. So, to reduce that messiness, I add a little car ‘trash can’ to the front and it saves me, ya’ll! I use a cereal container lined with a grocery bag ( a trick I found off of Pinterest!) I can put all of their snack and toy trash in it, and I just pull the bag out during any stops we make, and then add a fresh bag in. It sounds so silly, but it keeps me sane.
4. Plan our stops. Of course, this is within reason – traveling with kiddos means lots of unplanned stops. BUT we try to leave, and time each of our stops. For us, we usually leave while its still dark, and try to time up our first stop for ‘breakfast’. Then, hopefully, we won’t stop again until the next mealtime (fingers crossed!) I will add, too, we’ve learned of kid-friendly stops along some of our routes, and we try to remember those from year to year. I’ve taken a picnic blanket before and we’ve stopped at a huge rest area and let the kids chill and run around for a while.
We also bought a cargo carrier for our SUV that fits on the hitch, and we pack some of our bags in a tote, and put it on the cargo carrier, and YA’LL. I can’t tell you how helpful that is. It always stresses me out when our bags are all over the place and kids are stepping on them – things spilling out, bottles opening, shoes thrown everywhere. So minimizing the mess has made traveling easier for sure.
We’ve had some really fun road trips, and then we’ve had some mega disasters. I think the biggest thing that’s helped us through the years is to completely dismiss any expectations about how we think the trip will go and just take it for what it is!
Do you have any tried and true tips you use when taking road trips with the kiddos?
