Hitting the Road

For all of our married life, we have lived a little too far from family to seriously consider driving to see them. Last summer, though, we moved to Minnesota and found that most people here do drive west for vacations. We decided that we would try it this summer to see how the kids do. So, on Friday and Saturday we will be driving from here to Denver. Then, we will go on to Montana, and finally after about three weeks total, we will head back home. 2 small kids, 7 states, 3,000 miles. What should we do with all that time in the car?

I have been gathering ideas and laying plans for a while now to prevent all of us from deteriorating into family vacation beasties. We have the portable DVD player, but I want to limit the time my kids are watching movies. Instead of a non-stop movie fest, we have specific times they can watch (after lunch, for example), with a time-boxed length; also, I think we might use the movies as incentives for good behavior.

I ordered in about 10 audio books from the library, so we'll try a lot of new ones out. By the way, I just found out that Stockard Channing (of Grease and West Wing fame) has narrated all the Beverly Clearly Ramona books.

A friend suggest collecting items from the dollar store--things that we can throw out at the end of the trip. We can wrap them and dole them out every 100 miles or so. I think that the glow sticks will be a big hit as it starts to get dark. Garage sales have also proved to be good sources of cheap trinkets.

In order to preempt sibling squabbles, I am going to pack two backpacks with identical goods. The backpacks will be strapped to the front seats in our mini-vans, just in front of the kids for easy access. I haven't decided exactly what to put in them, aside from crayons, coloring supplies, and their travel notebooks.

The travel notebooks was another idea from a mom with lots of road miles under the family belt. I found some great websites with state information. Each kid gets coloring pages with the flag, bird, and flower for each state we will be driving through. (It turns out that the western meadowlark is a common state bird--4 of 7 of the states we are driving through chose it to represent their state. Who knew?) My older child gets a state map for each state, where she can write and draw about what she sees. They will also get to collect postcards from each state to put in their binders. We'll have a way of keeping track of license plates that we see, put some travel stickers in there, and also include a map of the full US to draw out our route as we go. Finally, we'll bring along Our 50 States by Lynne Cheney, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser (who also illustrated some of our favorites--Fancy Nancy and You Can't Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Musuem) that will give us some interesting state specific information and pictures.

Even with these plans, I wonder what other tricks we can have up our sleeves. So, with only a couple of days left before we depart, I am wondering what you have done to make it through long road trips. Ideas, anyone??