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We travel A LOT. With kids.
And the majority of this travel is in the good ol’ minivan.
And because 98% of my family lives in NH, that is generally our final destination. We make this trek 3-4 times a year and it has taken us anywhere from 7 to 10 hours each way. Because these trips have become sort of standard for us I usually leave the responsibility of packing toys/car activities/ movies to the kids and I handle packing the snacks and drinks (oh, and EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING for me and the kids). And I would say half of the trips the kids ROCK; 60% of the time they are sleeping or watching a movie quietly, and the other 40% is a mix of asking for food and throwing food trash back at me (which I can handle). The OTHER half of the trips (road trip with kids) is usually the typical nightmare scenario: “I’m STARVING”, “he’s touching me”, “what state are we in?”, “give it BACK!”, “I’m bored”, “are we almost there?”, “AAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!” (My toddler and I both contribute to that last one). It’s a crapshoot.
Now, the other 2% of my family just recently moved to a suburb outside of Atlanta. So now that’s a thing. And yes, flying would be the easiest thing to do – even with luggage and car seats and transportation to the airport and car rentals and potential airport delay nightmares – but having to buy 5 plane tickets just isn’t cost effective right now. SO WE ARE DRIVING. This trip may eventually become routine like the NH trips (maybe… we’ll see how this road trip with kids goes) BUT because 1) the trip is unchartered territory requiring substantially longer imprisonment 2) why not be over-prepared? and 3) I’m toggling between pretending it’s not happening and being terrified of the trip all together, I decided to create a Road Trip Kit.
Road Trip Matrix for a road trip with kids
I wracked my brain and did a bit of googling, as one does, to find some creative/ cheap/ easy car activities for “boys who like to punch each other and a toddler who likes to scream and throw stuff”. (KIDDING, kinda). We definitely plan on including some outside-the-car activities along the way but because traffic and routes are rarely predictable we make these stops on the fly. For inside-the-car activities, I created a matrix (above) and made sure I had a few in each box to choose from during the trip that I can periodically distribute as needed (picture me dropping them down from the ceiling of the van with a parachute like in the Hunger Games), with the goal of having some left over for the ride back (slash the hope that they last the whole trip).
Most of the things in the matrix are self explanatory, but I’ll dive into a few…
Scattergories
We play scattergories a lot during meals (both out and in), but not in the traditional sense. We start at the beginning of the alphabet and go through each letter (skipping the same letters that are left off the die in the traditional game, most of the time) and pick a category. The first person to say an acceptable answer gets the point. Usually we just think of the category on the fly, but for the trip I created a list of categories for each letter to make it effortless. For the trip we will use the white boards (we will also use for the spelling bee) to give each of the boys a chance at earning points for each letter/category.
“Finish the Lyric” & “No Words” music games
So we listen to soundtracks A LOT. “Finish the Lyric” is exactly how it sounds. The “NO Words” game was actually created by my toddler. You know the music in the background during movies? Like the music that plays while stuff is happening or people are talking – I think it’s called background score music? Anyway, when this music comes on in the car Emily will start telling us what part of the movie it is from. So I thought it would be fun if I made a playlist of ONLY these songs from various movies and the first person to guess the movie it’s from gets the point! Maybe bonus points if you can tell what the exact scene from the movie is? We’ll see how it goes.
BINGO
I was going to create our own BINGO boards but I decided to farm this one out for time purposes (I can go pretty far down the rabbit hole when creating art and graphics, and then it’s 6 hours later, it’s dark and I don’t know where the kids are). I had these BINGO cards from Travelchannel.com printed and laminated (thanks FedEX!) so we can use dry erase markers to play.
Art Stuff
I picked up three clipboards from Staples and a $3 13 pocket file folder to hold coloring pages, mazes, connect the dots, color by numbers (all printed from various places online – my favorite two: momjunction.com and thsprucecrafts.com), stickers, pencils, and crayons (divided up into 3 bags because #sharingsucks).
