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4 Road Trip Tips When Traveling with Tweens

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Road Trip Tips When Traveling with Tweens

Eight years ago, we moved from Chicago, Illinois to Tucson, Arizona. We still had family in Michigan, so we have made the road trip across 1,900 miles one way to visit family six times now. When we made the first trip, our kids were 10, 5, and 4. Our most recent trip was just a few weeks ago, and the kids are 18, 13, and 12. Traveling with them now is much easier, but regardless, the trip is a long one. We’ve learned many road trip tips when traveling with tweens. If you’re traveling with kids in the eight to 12-year-old age range, these tips may help your family survive a long road trip.

Road Trip Tips When Traveling with Tweens

Tweens are easier to travel with than younger kids, but they still can get bored quickly. Try these tips to make the trip go faster.

Make Maps for Them

I mapped out our route on Google Maps, magnified it, and printed it out. Then, I made binders for each kid with the seven pages showing the route. I put the pages in plastic page protectors and gave the kids dry erase markers. They marked on the pages as we passed areas, so they could see how much progress we had made and how much more we had to go. I also marked where we were stopping each night to make the three-day trip seem less daunting.

Have Them Pick a Fun Activity

Road Trip Tips When Traveling with Tweens

Before we left, each child researched the route and found one fun thing they wanted to do. Our favorite activity that a child picked was Cadillac Ranch in Texas. We brought along some spray paint and joined others in spray painting the upside-down cars planted in the ground. When we have driven by later, other times we are making the trip, the kids still talk about the fun they had and how weird the attraction is.

Pack Food. . .and More Food

Tweens are hungry most of the time, especially on a road trip. We pack sandwiches and chips for lunch, but we also pack A LOT of snacks. Popular snacks include beef jerky, pretzels, granola bars, squeezable apple sauce, squeezable pudding, and fruit. Make sure the kids can easily access the snacks.

Limit Stops

Our drive is so long that it takes us 10 to 12 hours of driving each day to get to Michigan in three days. Add in a fun stop, and there’s not much time for anything else.

When we stop for gas, we also use the restrooms and get out our sandwiches, if it’s lunchtime. When we combine all of our stops in one, we only stop for 10 or 15 minutes before we’re on the road again for another three to four hours. We have found Love’s Travel Centers have the cleanest restrooms.

Final Thoughts

Traveling with tweens is less stressful than traveling with younger kids, but they can still get bored and antsy on long road trips. Use these road trip tips when traveling with tweens for a smoother, more entertaining drive.

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Road Trips With a Young Child

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Road Trip with Young ChildThis week we will be embarking on our first real family vacation. We’ve been out on small trips to the cottage with our little one but this week we’re heading out on an 1,100 km road trip with her. Though my husband and I are both experienced travelers (everything from road-trips to international trips) having a baby with us will make traveling much different, I’m sure.

Knowing we would be trapped in the car for upwards of six hours in a day, I needed to get a plan in place or our lives may become miserable very quickly. These are things to consider when road-tripping with a little one.

 

Distractions are Crucial

Though she does well in a car for a short time, unless she falls asleep (and I’d rather not mess with her nap schedule too much) after about 15 mins we will be scrambling to entertain her. In our case, she is still rear facing in the back seat so I will be sitting back there with her which alone will be much better than her sitting alone. What to distract her with is where things can get interesting. She has little to no interest in traditional toys while in the car. The best way to distract her is to give her something she doesn’t normally get or has never seen before. Boring old toys won’t cut the trick. Here are a few things our little one like to play with and entertains her for quite some time:

  • Keys. I gathered three old keys we had, washed them (predicting them to go in her mouth) and placed them on a key ring.
  • Wallet. She loves to take my wallet apart so I found an old wallet and filled it with old cards and meaningless papers so in the event she loses them we’re fine.
  • New book. She usually enjoys looking at pictures in books, I specify new book since I know if it’s one she’s never seen before we will have more luck. I’ve purchased a book and won’t give it to her until the car ride starts.
  • Something with buttons. Kids love to push buttons. Remotes, cell phones, I don’t know what it is but she loves to push them. I have both an old remote and old (circa 1995) cell phone that she can do whatever she wants with.
  • DVD player. She doesn’t get to watch much, TV so the hope is that a little music or TV will keep her entertained for a bit.

 

Keep Routines the Best You Can

While driving, or any travel, this is a difficult task but we’re going to try our best to keep her eating and sleeping routines as close to normal. Thankfully we only have one time zone to cross and are breaking our long trip up by stopping overnight. Our plan is to stop every 2-2.5 hours to get out of the car, change her diaper and get a little fresh air. If my distractions work I should be able to keep her awake as well coax her into sleep when nap time comes.

 

Accept You Need Additional Time

Traveling with a little one is going to be much different from when it was just us. Though I feel like I have everything planned out, I full-well know she will be dictating this show and I’m ok with that. Our family knows and respects that we have a little one and she’s the star of the show, stuff comes up and we may take longer than expected to get there.

As long as she’s happy, we’re happy. Happy kid=Happy life.

Any tips for travelling with a little one?

Traveling With Children – Ideas to Make Your Trip More Enjoyable For All

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Traveling with children doesn't have to be a hassle

Found on Pixabay

Traveling with children may sometimes seem like a daunting task and it is if you expect them to sit in a car for hours on end with no entertainment whatsoever. By entertainment I am not referring to movies and video games (although they do come in handy on extremely long trips). There are many technology-free activities and ideas that can make your road trip an enjoyable one – for you and the children! Road trips are a great opportunity to spend some quality family time together.

When my daughters were only two, three and a half, and five and a half years old, our family went on an 11 hour road trip in a 7-seat mini van with one set of grandparents. There was not an empty spot in the van! We did not have a built in DVD player and our children did not own Nintendo DSs. Our two year old had a cast on her leg. Sounds like something not too many people would want to do doesn’t it? With minimal planning for an enjoyable road trip, the drive went off without a hitch – there and back! The children enjoyed it so much they were asking when we were going on our next long road trip. I came up with some of the ideas myself and found endless suggestions for games and activities and other entertainment ideas on the internet with search words like “car games” and “traveling with children”. Here is what we did.

 

Have Things to do While Traveling

We made sure to have a CD (at that time we did not have an MP3 player or an iPOD) with ALL of their favorite songs compiled onto one disc. We played this throughout the trip in the background for hours and had many, many family sing-a-longs. We packed a bag for each of our daughters as well, with their favorite things from home, that they kept by their seats on the floor of the van. This gave them the ability to self-entertain and gave us a break from constantly providing sources of entertainment.

Since we knew the drive was a long one, and even we were not that thrilled to be trapped in a vehicle for 11 hours, we made sure to try to hit the road early to make up some fast ground. This also provided us with the probability that the girls may sleep for a portion of the trip – another good way to kill some time. Our daughters have never been big sleepers, and although we were on the road before 6am, we did not get much sleeping out of them. If I remember correctly, our two year old fell asleep by nine and slept for about an hour or an hour and a half. Our three and a half year old slept for maybe 45 minutes shortly after lunch. That was it.

Breaks

No one can sit in a vehicle for eleven hours without bathroom breaks and without getting out to stretch tired legs. With children, it is even more important to do this. We made sure to include breaks as part of our trip. We timed them with lunch, for instance, and also with museums or parks we wanted to visit. This allowed us to provide our children with a definite timeline so when they asked how much longer until we stop, we were able to give them an answer, which seemed to satisfy them.

Entertainment

We made sure to play games with our daughters too. These games not only passed time for them, but for us as well. We played the ever popular “I Spy” and we also had our girls on the lookout for as many blue cars as they could find, and how many trucks they could see, etc. We looked for the letters of the alphabet, in order, on highway signs, as well as numbers, in order. With older children you can improvise these games by giving them a word such as “elephant”. They must find all of the letters, in order, on the highway signs. The first person to spell the word wins. Have them write down the name of one of the cities or towns on one of the highway signs and see who can rearrange the letters to spell the most words. Older children may also enjoy trying to find license plates from all 50 of the United States and/or all 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada.

We did bring along a couple of portable DVD players and the older girls did end up watching one movie each, during the final hours of the trip. However, the highlight of their road trip was the surprise bags they got every hour of the trip! Thanks to the Dollar Store, I was able to purchase some inexpensive toys and activities to surprise them with. It was really fun shopping for things I knew they would like and it did not cost me much when it came right down to it. Before we left on our trip, I labelled twenty-two paper bags for each daughter – eleven for the trip there and eleven for the way back. I filled three or four of them with a juice box and snacks they do not typically get to eat at home. That way I knew they would be getting a snack every couple of hours. I filled about three bags with toys or books or activities I already had at home that they had not used in a while. They were excited to see them when they opened the bags and enjoyed them just as much as the stuff I bought new from the Dollar Store. My two year old loved to play with socks so I actually put a couple of pairs of socks in one of her bags and she entertained herself by putting them on and off both her hands and her feet! I filled all but one of the rest of the bags with items I had purchased at the Dollar Store. One of the biggest hits was colored pipe cleaners! I bought one package of 20 – 40 pipe cleaners and divided them up between my three daughters. They had great fun twisting them into different creations such as candy canes, letters of the alphabet and butterflies!

I only purchased one brand new bigger, more potentially expensive, toy for each of my girls, which was a mini Littlest Pet Shop kit that folds up for travel. Luckily, I had gotten them on sale a few months earlier, knowing I was planning to buy them something for this road trip. They received them in one of the first few bags of the road trip and they played with them on the road trip there, at the house we were staying at, on all the little road trips once we reached our destination, and on the way back too. They still play with them now, two years later, so they were well worth the money.

Road trips with children can be very successful and rewarding with very little planning and very little money spent. I am speaking from experience.

What other tips do you have for traveling with children?