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Road trips can be hard with kids. It gets long and boring for them. Let’s be honest, road trips get long and boring for us too. This summer we took a long road trip to California for a family reunion and it was 13 hours one way. We did it in one day both ways and I’m happy to say that the kids did awesome. I was very prepared for the trip and I have a few tips and hacks to share with you to make your road trips easier too :).
One of the most important things for a road trip are the snacks, they are essential to keeping the kids happy. When the kids are happy, then it makes for a much better ride. I headed to Safeway to get a variety of foods for our trip.
Here are a few things that I got. Like I said before, happy kids = happy mom = happy road trip. So I got some things that I know that they would love and enjoy during the trip.
One of my favorite things to make for road trips is a trail mix. You get something sweet, salty and protein in just one snack! Plus it’s a fairly clean food (all foods are messy at our house 🙂 ). My favorite trail mix just has a few ingredients:
M&Ms- any variety, I put in milk chocolate, peanut and birthday cake.
Pretzels
Raisins
Peanuts
Add all the ingredients into the a bowl and mix. You can put in as much or as little of each ingredient that you want, that’s the joy of it.
Instead of doing one big bag or bowl, I gave each kid their own bag of it. I have found that is by far the best way to do it, on trips or at home. They do so much better when they have their own stuff.
I made each one of my kids their own snack container so they can have their own food and it’s portioned out nicely. Plus it’s so much cheaper to by a box of something and put it into bags, rather than buying them individually packaged. I put them in a container so they can control their own food and then they can put their garbage in them too and not on the ground. Here is what I put in them:
Oreos
Trail Mix
Wheat Thins
Capri Sun.
The Capri Suns are my favorite drink for road trips because they are big enough that they quench the thirst of the kids, but not too big that it makes them go to the bathroom every 10 minutes.
It all fits nicely into the container. I put the lid on it and wrote the kids’ names on it.
Now that I have the food and snacks under control- it’s time for some entertainment. When we went to California, I made up one Bingo sheet for the kids and it was a HUGE HIT!! It forced the kids to look out the window, see the landscape of places they had never seen and actually enjoy the ride. So I made up a couple more that they can play. The kids can play all three games at once (if they are older) or just do one at a time. Either way, it’s a fun things to do on the trip. You can print out the three games here: Road Sign, Farm and Vehicles.
All I did for these was put them in page protectors and gave the kids a dry erase marker to mark off the ones that they see. I also made them some individual binders to put them in, you can get the tutorial for that here.
Here is everything all ready for our next road trip.
The snack containers were a big success!! The kids loved the snacks inside.
And here is a picture from our trip to California. My daughter is playing her Bingo game. If you have kids that fight non stop (like my three boys), consider separating them with a kid in a car seat. They aren’t as apt to punch or touch each other when there is a car seat between them.
Another thing that you can do is make a garbage bag for your car.
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What are some of your favorite road trip hacks? What do you do to make your trips great?
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kelly denton
Great tips! I love making the trash accessible to the back seat. My biggest travel pet peeve is kids (and husbands) discarding trash on the floor. #client