Tips for a Great Summer Road Trip with Kids

The last time we went on a road trip was last summer, it went well, but it was also only about a 5 hour trip.  Our last LONG road trip was about 3 and a half years ago, we drove 17 hours to visit my brother and his family over Thanksgiving.  The trip technically was only about 14 hours but you know with kids you have to add another couple hours for stops.  Our kids at that time were 8, 4, and 3 months old.  We drove through the night, and it was a great way to travel.  The one good factor we had going for us is that we had family waiting for us when we arrived to watch the kids for a few hours so my husband and I could get a bit of sleep.

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This summer we are once again going on a pretty long road trip.  This time to Mt. Rushmore!  My kids are beyond excited for this trip!  It's about a 13 hour drive for us, and our kids are now ages 10 (almost 11), 7.5, and 3 (almost 4).

As I was thinking and planning for our trip, I of course did a few Pinterest searches.  You know the web is filled with amazing ideas!  I found a TON of awesome ideas!  I am now excited to share with you the things I found and what I will be using to help keep the hooligans, boys, in line in the car.

First up, are activity packets.  I printed off a ton of games, coloring pages, and a U.S. National Parks and Historic Places packet for Elijah to work on.  I printed off travel bingo, tic tac toe, dots, the license plate game, billboard alphabet game, and some Star Wars coloring pages. They also each have a United States map that they can use to track our route to Mt. Rushmore.  I bought some clip boards that you can store stuff in, and went ahead and had the pages all bound together, that way we don't have papers flying all over the car.  To get them bound at Office Max was about $3 a book, not sure if was worth it, but I think for my sanity over pages flying every where it just might be.

Go to Edventures for Kids to find the printables that I used.

Next, I saw this great idea to have little packages for the kids to open at certain intervals during the trip.  I went to the dollar store and hit up the Target Dollar Spot for cheap items to fill these bags.  I found coloring books, little trinket toys, glow sticks, stickers, and candy.  These will make a great surprise for them along the way. I just bought the plain old brown lunch sacks to put them in because I couldn't find fun colorful bags anywhere!  I'm not sure if I will let them open one an hour, or one at every stop we make.  I am leaning towards every stop we make, like a gas station or rest area.  Each child will have 6 bags to open during our trip there.  Since we will be traveling at night after dark, I got some glow sticks for them, those will be the last bags they open.  One great tip I learned was to not forget the trip home!  So some of these items will be used for our return trip.  I will bring some paper bags with us and fill a few of them before we leave to come home.  They will probably only get about 2-3 bags each on the way home though.

Then, we bought a few travel games.  Some we found at garage sales (travel Battleship and the wooden peg games), another I just bought from Toys R Us (travel Connect 4) and my mom bought us the game travel Spot It.  Even though I printed off some travel Bingo games, I also had these fun Auto Bingo games that I found at Cracker Barrel, so we will be bringing these along as well.

Next up is our food list!  When we travel, we typically like to eat out, but our budget for this trip is very small.  So this time we will be taking food for our lunches, our hotel will provide breakfast, and then we will just eat dinner out.  So in the car I plan to have bread to make sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly,  we will also buy a few lunchables to have just to break up the sandwich monotony, a case of bottled water, some juice boxes, and other snack food.  We will have grapes and apples along with cheese sticks as well.  I like to also bring some goldfish crackers, yogurt tubes, and raisins those things are easy for my kids to grab and eat in the car.

If you are taking a road trip this summer I highly suggest you take a look at Kids Activities Blog she has an amazing list of tips for travel with kids.

I hope this gave you some great ideas for your next road trip!  I will give my review on how this all worked out for us when we return!