Tips & Tricks for Traveling with Kids
Over the past 16 years of being parents, we have traveled far and wide with our girls. Many of these trips have included long plane rides or even longer cross-country drives, sometimes straight through the night to get to our destination. Here are a variety of ideas that helped us enjoy these long trips, and we hope you find them helpful too!
The number one thing we bring with us on any trip is PATIENCE. Your kids take their emotional cues from you, so if you can be positive and stay calm no matter what is happening, that will help your kids stay positive and calm too. We have dealt with international flight delays, lost baggage, traffic jams, carsickness, dangerous road conditions, and last-minute changes due to weather, pandemics, and disgusting hotel rooms… but as long as we stay calm and positive, our girls have been able to roll with it and our travels have been a success.
DVDs are a godsend.
If you have a DVD player in your van, use it. iPads with downloaded movies are great too. When the girls were younger, we would only use the DVD player in the van when we were “on the fast road” (highway) so it was reserved for road trips and they saw it as a special treat. Now on road trips we choose movies that we all enjoy, so even the driver and navigator in the front seat can listen to the audio while we drive.
Snacks and more snacks.
Our family doesn’t have a lot of candy in our house, so road trips are a time we let our girls have whatever candy they want… but just one bag at the start of the trip, and then one small bag each time we have to stop for fuel. I also pack a variety of healthy snack options that include different textures and sweet/salty flavors - like apples, carrots, grapes, crackers, trail mix, etc.
Car Games
Yep, now is the time to pull out all those old car games you played when you were a kid, before the days of the iPod or DVD player. The Alphabet Game, identifying makes of semi trucks, the Number Game, and I Spy are all classics that we still play on long drives today.
Drive overnight.
If we’re making a long drive to get to a destination (rather than seeing sites along the way) we try to do as much driving overnight as possible, with the better car-sleeper taking naps during daylight. A 24-hour drive will leave us super tired no matter when we arrive, so we try to plan our arrival time to be in the late afternoon. That way we can eat dinner and get to bed early, and not feel trashed for our first full day at our destination.
Headphones please.
Disclaimer: in some states, it is illegal to wear headphones while driving, so check the state laws where you’ll be traveling! Sky prefers to listen to music while he drives overnight, so we always bring headphones for him to do that while the rest of us are sleeping. Everyone else uses their headphones to listen to music or movies, so we don’t all have to listen in.
Jukebox Karaoke
For this game, take turns passing around one person’s phone and adding a song to your Spotify queue playing over the car speakers. This is fun because everyone gets a chance to hear their favorite songs (and we get to introduce our girls to classics by REO Speedwagon and Tiffany)
Unwrap activities.
When our girls were younger, I would wrap travel activities like presents for them to open at different points during our trip. Each present would be labeled for the time it was to be unwrapped - usually when we would cross the border of a new state, or 30 minutes after a meal stop, or a certain number of hours into the trip. By labeling them, I avoided hearing the question “can we open another one?” every 10 minutes!
Arts and Crafts.
The key to crafts is reserving these activities for road trips only - that way they are special! Over the years, our girls have enjoyed window markers, Etch-a-Sketch, Color Wonder marker books, Mad Libs, friendship bracelet string kits, travel journals, new coloring books, magnet games, and other age-appropriate activities that are portable and fun.
Limited Potty Breaks
This tip depends on who has the smallest bladder in your family… but for our family, we try to limit fuel/potty breaks to every 3+ hours during the day for a long road trip. Only getting water at rest stops helps with this.