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Road Trip Survival
Aug 13 2007 by Emily Hansen
8/13/2007
Tips and Tricks for In-Car Entertaining
August is the last hurrah of summer, so now's the time when those of us who have failed to do anything that resembles family togetherness begin to scramble to plan some sort of outing. Because my brain no longer seems to work in Martha Stewart fashion (some might question whether it ever did), I decided to take the easy way out of vacation planning: The default trip to visit my parents 300 miles away.
Some would argue that this is just plain boring and couldn't possibly rival the challenge of a 3,000-mile plane trip across the country, and it probably can't, but it's not exactly for the faint of heart. This summer, I offered to take my sister's children along with my own three and our 75-pound dog. I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking. My seven-passenger Ford Freestyle is plenty big for transporting my kids and my niece and nephew on a regular basis, but on this trip, I felt like we were traveling cross-country in a clown car. The don't-touch-me chorus started about 50 miles out of town and didn't cease for the majority of the trip. The only somewhat-peaceful time was when the DVD player was on, which was about an hour of our five-and-a-half-hour journey. Even while the movie was on, I often got the shout-out from the backseat that the dog was blocking the view. Come on, dog, don't you know that Matilda is doing her magic, here? After a miserable ride to our destination, I employed all the tricks I could remember from traveling with toddlers (and some more for my sophisticated 5- to 8-year-old crowd on this trip) for our ride home.
Here are a few of my best tricks: Stop more often than you think you should. Normally I make that 280-mile drive with one stop for a meal and leg stretching. This time we stopped three times — two short pit stops and a long lunch by the river, with plenty of room for the kids to run around. Even my teenager appreciated being able to stretch his nearly 6-foot frame. Next, we played a bevy of car games. The alphabet game was my favorite as a kid, and my kids enjoyed it too, until the rule variations got out of hand around the letter Q. Then it was time to move on to another classic: Cow counting. I wasn't sure these digital natives would really embrace that one, but after a while they did start to get into this "old-fashioned" (my 6-year-old's words) in-car entertainment. Finally, I busted out the window markers and let the kids go to town on some fabulous mobile artwork. The final straw for my teenager was when his sister said "Let's sing 100 bottles of beer on the wall." That's when he put on his headphones and I tried to think of a really good reason why the other four shouldn't sing about my favorite malt beverage. Then we did anyway, all the way home.
What are your favorite tricks for surviving the ultimate summer family road trip?
