Guest Blogger: Keeping Your Kids Entertained on Family Road Trips

Guest Blog #65, Entry #506, April 27, 2011

Me and the family just got back from our family road trip to visit the in-laws. While the Walt Disney trip is about 6-7 hours away by car, everytime we take the trip it seems like 10-15 hours with 2 teenagers and a 5 year old daughter! This year, me and my husband got smart, we left out at 5:00 in the morning, and by time the kids were really waking up, we were half way there! The other trick was keeping them entertained. The DVD player in the truck helped, as well as plenty of activities for the younger one.

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Activities in the car can help your sanity and theirs

Today my Guest Blogger, Julie Rukavina gives you more great ideas for keeping your kids busy on a family road trip. This Spring and Summer, I can guarantee more family road trips are on the way, and many of these tips can help you and me!

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If you are taking your kids on a long road trip, you are going to need to come up with stuff for them to do, otherwise you are facing several hours trapped in a small space with cranky kids who won’t stop asking “are we there yet?” You’ve got to be creative when coming up with activities for the kids because although singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” is always fun, it’s bound to drive you crazy after the first thirty stanzas or so. With that torturous fate in mind, here are several suggestions for games that will keep your children happy during car trips.

You can purchase travel versions of popular board games for your kids to play during the car trip. There are travel editions available for classic games such as Scrabble, chess, checkers, Backgammon, Boggle, Guess Who, Clue and Battleship. You can also give your kids a pack of cards so they can play games like War, Spit, Cheat and Go Fish.

Food, drink and activities are essential for a peaceful roadtrip

A scavenger hunt designed specifically for a car trip is also a great idea. You can put together a list of things ahead of time, hand out the lists to your children and hopefully they will spend at least a good half an hour glued to the window looking for the items on their list. You can include things like license plates from particular states, cows, bodies of water, wildlife, cops, customized license plates, people talking on cell phones, bikes, signs and expensive cars on the list. If you don’t want to put together a scavenger hunt, you can find a list online or purchase a scavenger hunt kit.

Your kids may also enjoy doing crossword puzzles, Sudoku, word searches, mad libs or other word games. Younger children may be more interested in a coloring book. If your kids are not prone to getting car sick, they can play “Spaghetti and Meatballs,” a game where you read out loud from a book. To play the game you must substitute the word “spaghetti” for any word that begins with an “s” and the word “meatball” for any word that begins with an “m.” If you mess up, the next person gets to take a turn.

Bringing along Legos could possibly turn into a mess, but at least it will keep your kids occupied for a while. The Legos can be stored in ziplock bags or shoeboxes. Before your car trip, take your kids to the Lego store and have them pick out a new box of Legos or two. Make them wait until the family car trip to open the boxes, and they’ll spend a good amount of time reading the instructions and trying to build the model on the front of the box. You can also hold a contest to see who can build the best object related to your trip.

Julie Rukavina is from the cheap rental car website CarRentalExpress.com.

For more family vacation ideas on Stagetecture, click here.