The school year is coming to a close and for many that means making plans for a road trip. We’ve been there with our kids!
Traveling with little ones can be rough. They just want to get out! The kids get along so much better when they have something to think about besides being stuck in the car. We’ve tried the movie in the car trick, and it does work for a while, but I feel like they miss a lot of what travel is about when their main entertainment is a screen.
Here are some fun tricks that have worked well for our kids on long car rides. I’m also going to include some ideas to make car sickness easier to handle.
Travel Fun for Kids
As I’ve planned ahead for our car trips, I knew that the little ones would need something to keep them going. I knew we’d be stopping about every 2 hours to fill up with gas, use the bathroom, and get a snack or meal. What about the long 2 hours in between? I decided to break them up by a prize halfway through! In other word, after one hour of driving is a prize, then after the next hour is a break. We’d repeat that as long as the car trip would last, sometimes 10 hours in one day! Then I’d have game ideas for in between the prizes and stops.
Car trip Prizes
The prizes have to be well picked, sometimes homemade, to be entertaining for the car without making them feel queezy or getting lost in the car too quickly. Here are a few my kids have liked.
Their own Map! Sometimes we’ve printed out a simple map of our long trip for each kid. We highlight stops we’ll make, or attractions they might see as we pass. They’ve really enjoyed looking at these maps and seeing the progress we make on our trip.
Pipe Cleaners! Just giving a little one a few pipe cleaners can be so much fun for them. When you show them how they can bend into new shapes or formed into a bracelet, it’s fun to watch them get creative. Some of them will get bored with it fast, and some will make a new game for themselves.
Flannel board fun! Do you remember back when a flannel board and felt were a popular way to present a lesson or story? Well, I got out my glue gun and covered a piece of card stock with white flannel. Then I used felt to cut out other shapes to give them something to stick on there. Each kid got their own mini flannel board, stuck to the seat in front of them or on their window with masking tape. They would have fun with their own, then see if they could trade with a sibling. And I’ve kept them and reused them for car trips again and again.
Puppets! I made hand puppets for our kids one year that I kept and reused on long trips. I cut them out of felt, all in the same basic shape, then added felt pieces and fabric paint to make them look like different animals. This was a fun prize for kids to get creative with and play with their siblings.
Road Games
I spy! All you have to do is look out the window and say “I spy something…” with a clue, and you’ve got a game going. My kids like to play it so that the person who guesses right is the next person to get to spy.
A rainbow of cars! My kids love this game, and play it just while we drive around the city. They try to find a vehicle for each color of the rainbow in order from red to purple. Sometimes it takes a while, but sometimes they can find them all in a couple of miles.
Spy the alphabet! This is another one my kids will just randomly start playing as we drive around. Between the street signs and the lisence plates, there are lots of letters to help you find the whole alphabet from A to Z.
Car songs! My family growing up had a songs for everything, and a car trip was no exception. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea,” and “Pearly Shells,” were among our car trip songs. My husband and kids aren’t really into that, but we do turn on music and sing along at some point on our long car rides.
Scavenger hunt! It’s really easy to find a premade scavenger hunt for a car trip. It’s almost as easy to make your own as you think about things that can be seen outside as you drive along. It can really help the kids enjoy the landscape as you drive through it.
Car Sickness
Having the kids get car sick is a very unpleasant interruption to a trip you’ve looked forward to! Parenting life is full of Interruptions, though. Here’s what we’ve learned about that over the years.
Dramamine (car sickness prevention medicine) and motion sickness bracelets have worked well to prevent our kids from getting car sick. You can probably find both of them at your local pharmacy, or on Amazon, where they also have other ideas we haven’t tried yet.
But, there have also been lots of times where it has not been prevented! We have to be prepared for that too!
Gallon zipper bags work well to catch their vomit, if you can catch it before it happens.
Disinfecting wipes work well to clean most of the throw-up off of the carpet and upholstery in the vehicle.
Baby wipes are a must when you are traveling with kids! They’re good for cleaning snacks off sticky hands and faces, for wiping noses when you don’t have a tissue, and great for cleaning vomit too. And your hands after you clean them yucky mess!
A fresh change of clothes and a plastic bag to hold soiled ones can be kept handy under the seat in case of car sickness or other incidents where fresh clothes are needed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been out with little kids that I was so glad I had a change of clothes handy for them!
And Baking Soda! Before we discovered the many uses of baking soda, if a kid threw up in the car we had to deal with the smell for miles!! Ugh! But since we learned this trick we can get rid of the smell before we start driving again. As soon as you’ve wiped up all you could, sprinkle baking soda over the wet, smelly fabric. It will soak up the smell and the rest of the liquid from the vomit. Once it’s all dry, after a few hours, you just vacuum it out and the mess it gone. 😃
Thanks for reading my post! If you liked it share it! I hope you enjoy your traveling adventures!
