People often ask me how it is that we can travel so much--by car--with our young children. We have, after all, just topped 80,000 miles on our 2008 Acadia. Even baby Mason has been to 42 of the 50 states. I think my usual answer tends to surprise people. "My kids love to travel as much as I do." I say. "They love to eat out, sleep in hotel rooms, and spend hour after hour contemplating the changing landscape." And what is the key to achieving this goal, people wonder? Well, I think it's simply doing it. Our kids have grown up taking road trips. They don't know anything else. We pile them into the car at least once a month and take an overnight trip somewhere. Sometimes it's a lot more than once a month. Sometimes we go for the entire month. Our kids just know how to be flexible. And as for keeping kids happy in the car, I have only two suggestions:
Number one: limit the number of movies you watch. I know that seems crazy to most people, but if kids have to invent something to do to entertain themselves while sitting in the car, most will. And more often then not, car time can come to equal great quality talking time, or even better, thinking time. I think it's good for kids to learn how to think, and long car trips are the perfect place to practice.
Number two: teach them something about the places you are traveling through and to. We've got quite a collection of books giving fun facts and details about each one of the 50 states. We try to learn something about every place we go, and it helps the kids feel interested in and connected to the places we visit.
If, however, both of these ideas fail, as they did on the recent 16-hour-in-one-day car trip to Boston the kids and I tried to make on our own, (it went so well Nick caught a flight and joined us midway!) then there's only one other suggestion I've got. This:
Rest Stop Relays. Sometimes we've all just got to stretch our legs. If that's the case, then its pull over and relay, relay, relay.
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