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.
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Long road trips for young children can be challenging but if you plan it right you can create some great summer memories. And with new tools like the smart phones and ipads you can really save yourself a lot of valuable room in the car. Instead of lugging around puzzles and games to play with little pieces to loose or eat depending on the child. Now you just have to have some great apps loaded and ready to go. Only you know your child’s likes and dislikes and might test out some games before you head out on your journey.
My 5 year old daughter loves legos and ninjago is one of her favorite, so I ended up getting a fun tap game also known as a bubble popping game. The game she really liked was Evil’>http://www.evilsushisquish.com“>Evil Sushi Squish It was a life saver and a great way for her to get her bottled up energy out. She goes to town tapping my phone and loves to get to new ninja levels. This was a really great game for our trip, and I’m sure there are many others out there.
Another thing I did to prepare for our 6 hour drive was to go to the Evil’>http://www.evilsushisquish.com“>Evil Sushi Squish web site and download the color sheets and activities. So when we got to the hotel she spent the evening coloring the charters of the game and played her Dad Evil Sushi Squish tic tac toe.
So one thing I see is that the app games are becoming broader based and lots of them have web pages with extended activities. Evil Sushi Squish was so popular with my daughter she never even asked for a different game. But this goes back to repetition and how children can hear the same story over and over and never tire of it. You just have to find the right story or game.
Hope this helps other parents about to take that summer car trip.
Great tips! Thanks Amanda, I will try and download some of those color sheets – my daughter could use them 🙂
Where did you find the car seat travel caddy you have in the picture?
Hi Jennifer
This image was from a family website that one of my ghostwriters found back in 2011 – so I can’t tell you where it’s sourced from. sorry. 🙁 Now we put where the images come from!