Road Trip Tips

We have been quite busy since our road trip, but I thought I would jot down some tips that worked for us in our travels … and some things that didn’t work. On this last trip, we were driving 4-7 hours every day. That’s a lot of driving. And, it’s not easy to keep 8 kids happy with that much driving.

First and foremost, I think the main reason our trip went as smoothly as it did is because we have a DVD player in the car. We aren’t big TV watchers at home. And we never use the car player if we’re just around town. But, on trips, it’s a lifesaver! I am SO thankful for it. When we’re in a beautiful area, I turn off the video so they can enjoy God’s magnificent creation. And, actually, my 4 year old was usually the first one to notice something awesome, even when the video was on. It was so cute to hear his exclamations of “Mom, look at that mountain!” or similar things J

Each child brings their own bag of toys. It’s usually a backpack. Most of the kids have a Nintendo DS or a Leapster. Those are another blessing when travelling. Then they have books, drawing materials, games, action figures, etc.

As for snacks, I can never seem to figure out how to make that work. I have had each kid bring their own snack bags so they can eat when they want, but that seems to be messier. This time I had the stash of snacks up front. So, they had to ask for snacks when they were hungry. But even that resulted in a large pile of food between the seats of the 4 year old and 6 year old and tons of snacks on the floor everywhere. We tried to do a quick clean out of trash and large chunks of snack when we stopped at hotels, but we still ended up with a huge mess in that regard.

Water worked much better. Each of us had a stainless steel water container. The kids had sippy lids on theirs, so if it fell over it didn’t spill … much. We carried a 2 gallon water container from Wal-Mart that had a large opening to fill it up and a dispenser spigot. We refilled the water container along the way. At every stop, we would refill everyone’s stainless steel container. That way everyone had water and we didn’t have to worry about thirst … unless they couldn’t find their water bottle J. This system worked really well.

We wanted to make this trip low budget and we didn’t want to eat at fast food often. We brought a cooler with food. It had sandwich makings, fruits, veggies and snack foods like hummus, artichoke dip, etc. I think another good idea would have been cold salads – pasta, potato, macaroni, etc. We also had a few stackable crates with paper plates, cups, plastic ware and dry foods – bread, snacks, chips, etc. Most of the hotels we stayed at included breakfast. But we often ate lunch and dinner on the road or in hotels.

We had to make the food relatively accessible, so we packed the car accordingly! We often ate in parking lots of the various attractions we visited. Sometimes we would just pull over and slap together a meal and jump back in the car to continue driving. A couple times we brought the food into the hotel room to have dinner if we arrived early enough. This worked really well for saving money on food. We rarely ate fast food on this trip.

This is the first time we have ever gone on a trip where we stayed in a different place every night. With 10 people in the car, we certainly didn’t want to have to bring everyone’s duffel bag into every room every night. The system I came up with worked really well. I packed each person’s clothes in a laundry basket. The laundry baskets nested inside of each other. So, I had two stacks of laundry baskets in the car. (Note to self: If other people are travelling with you, have them use the same luggage system. Throwing duffel bags and a different sized basket into the mix really messed up the system. Also, make sure guest family of 3 doesn’t pack as much luggage as our partial family of 7. You’d think I’d be used to this from her by now, but I’m not ;)

I started the trip with one duffel bag packed with PJs for each person and one outfit for the next day. I checked the internet regularly so I had an idea of what clothing we would need each day. Every morning as I packed up the car, I would pull an outfit for each person out of their laundry basket. The clothes were easy to access, because the baskets are open. We would just lift up the stack and pull clothes out of each basket. The bigger kids pulled out their own clothes. I used the same PJs a few days in a row. And, if clothes were clean after a day’s travels, I had them reuse the clothes in the morning. This saved on laundry. I packed the overnight bag in the morning so I wouldn’t have to do it at night as we pulled into a hotel parking lot, inevitably very tired. It took a while to do each morning and it would have been a daunting task after travelling all day.

One thing I forgot was a way to store dirty clothes. I think I should have started with an empty laundry basket (or two) that we could put dirties into. An alternative would be a big trash bag, but the laundry basket would have fit in with the stack and kept the dirty clothes separate from the clean without looking like an explosion in the back of the van.

There were a few things that I didn’t pack into each person’s basket. We had a separate bag with everyone’s socks and lace up shoes. That way if we found a place to hike, or if it got chilly, we just pulled out the bag of shoes and put them on. Otherwise, we wore sandals or slip on shoes during our travels. The same idea worked for jackets. If it was cold, I grabbed jackets very easily – at least in theory.

We also had a swim bag. I usually tried to get a hotel with a pool, especially if the kids had been sitting in the car for hours a day. The pool is a great way to let off steam after being strapped in all day. If we were going to swim at a hotel, I just grabbed the swim bag along with the clothing bag to bring into the hotel. And since the swimsuits were in their own bag, it didn’t matter if they were wet. We found the best way to dry swimsuits was to hang them on hangers in the closet. And since the swimsuits were in their own bag, it didn’t affect anything else if they were packed wet.

The only other tip I can think of is that we tried to fill the gas tank when it got down to half a tank. We didn’t want to be caught in the middle of nowhere low on gas. Believe me, coming from Southern California , we aren’t used to being in the middle of nowhere. It can be a long way between gas stations in other parts of the country.