Tips for Traveling with Kids

Our family likes to take trips together.  In the past, our family usually heads to Florida to visit with family for a week.  However, this summer our family will be traveling a little bit longer in a different direction.  We will be moving from North Carolina to Colorado.  I just checked and that is a 1,470 mile ride, one way.  If your children are like mine, it doesn’t take long before they are bored and start asking questions like, “Are we there yet?”, “How much longer?”, “I’m hungry!”, “I’m bored!”.   So, I thought I would share a few ideas that I  have used in the past while traveling with my kids, to help pass the time away.

The first thing I do is let my kids pack a bag or backpack with a few of their favorite things in it.  For my oldest daughter, it usually contains her mp3 player, a couple of books, notebook, sketch pad, pencils and colored pencils.  For my younger kids, they will usually pack notebooks, crayons, a small baby doll (for my youngest daughter) and small cars (for my youngest son).  I always like that most of these items are small and easy to pick up or clean up if they are dropped.  We do allow them to bring their hand-held video console to play on occasion.  They all share this and it is usually something that the older sibling will pack with the charger and games.

Secondly, I like to pack each of my children their own snack bag to put in their backpack or bag.  It could be anything from chewing gum, gummies, fruit roll-ups to crackers.  These snacks have always varied by the age of my children.  I just try to make sure it is something that won’t make too much of a mess, but will hold them over to the next meal that we stop for.  We also usually carry a cooler for drinks, fruit and sandwich meat and have been known to pull off at a rest area to have an impromptu picnic to help get the wiggles out.

Finally, our family loves to play games in the vehicle.  No, we don’t play a game of toss with a ball or anything that will make it dangerous while someone is driving.  We like to play “I Spy”, a game we call the “ABC’s” and another game we call the “Tags” game.  I am sure you are all familiar with the “I Spy” game, so I thought I would explain briefly about how we play the other two games.  The “ABC” game is when you pick out words on signs that begin with each letter of the alphabet beginning with the letter A.  However, when our younger two were children and started playing, we allowed them to just look for the letters on signs instead of words.  The “Tags” game is where we all keep track of how many different state tags we see on vehicles that pass us.  We all usually have a fun time doing this with each others.

Do you have any travel tips you use that you use with your family?  We would love for you to share them with us!