Planning a road trip with your family this summer? After doing a 2000 mile round trip to Texas this Spring Break, here are some of the essential tips we picked up for travelling with young children. I’d love to hear your ideas too! Drop a comment below!
This blog post contains some affiliate links which cost nothing for you to use but will generate me a small income. I have only linked things I would/have used myself.
1. Plan your journey
Now this might sound totally obvious, but it really is essential for any road trip to plan the route you’re going to take. We decided to drive overnight on the 14 hour trip down so that the kids would hopefully sleep for the majority of the trip. Thankfully that’s exactly what happened and so it made the journey so much easier for us! We did the drive back to Chicago in the day, and whilst we had the benefit of daylight and seeing the gorgeous countryside we were driving through, we had to stop a lot more to keep the kids from getting too fidgety!
When planning, make sure you think about where you can stop to get petrol/gas. As we drove through the bottom of Illinois, we drove through a national park and finding a rest stop was so much harder than on the bigger freeways. Also if you decide to travel at night, check the opening hours for anywhere you plan to stop! Lots of the fuel stations are automated so open 24/7 but not all of them are, so make sure you check!
2. essential road trip Snacks
This goes without saying but you are going to get hungry! And if your kids are anything like mine, they are going to want snacks constantly! But rather than loading up on just sweets and crisps from the rest stop vending machines (candy and chips as they are here!), make sure you plan what you are going to eat on the trip. We took a range of homemade sandwiches, fruit (grapes/raisins are perfect!) and breakfast bars. We did have some sweets and crisps on hand too for when we wanted that ultimate snack moment! It also helped speed up the journey as the kids were allowed one sweet per song for a little while along the I-55!
3. Audio
Another essential for your road trip is to think about what you’re going to listen to! We drove for around 30 hours which is a lot of time to fill! I made some playlists on Spotify which included a mix of songs we like and that the kids could join in with, but we also had a playlist for just the adults whilst the kids were sleeping! We also listened to The Gruffalo on Audible to help get the kids to sleep at bedtime. As it was familiar to them, it really helped keep their routine even though we were in a car! Whilst the kids slept, Dan and I listened to a few great podcasts too. When you’re all feeling a bit fatigued from the travel, a great way to pass the time is to each pick a song and use the “add to queue” function on Spotify or Apple Music. This way you can keep the kids engaged and also not have to listen to the Paw Patrol theme tune or Shake It Off on repeat!
4. Essential road trip Clothing
Whilst you need to think about what you’re packing, you also need to think about what you’re all going to wear to keep yourselves as comfortable as possible on the road trip! We opted for pyjamas for the girls on the way down, coupled with their favourite blankets to keep them cosy! I wore sports leggings and layered tops both ways so that I was comfy but also had the ability to take layers off/put them on when I got hot or cold. On the way back we had stopped overnight in St Louis, and so the last few hours I had my high-waisted jeans on. What a bad choice! I was fine for the first bit of the drive home but then ended up just super uncomfortable and longing for a stretchy waistband!
5. Pack your car properly
Those swimming costumes and inflatable unicorns for your final destination? You won’t need them in the car so make sure they’re wayyyy at the back! The kids’ books, charging cables and snacks – they’re an essential on your road trip so make sure they’re accessible! Alongside our usual suitcase, I bought a couple of cheap square laundry baskets from Target which when empty, could stack easily, but when filled, made the perfect accessible place to keep all the things we might need on the go! The main thing is just to know roughly where things are! No one wants to be searching for the teddies at a rest stop in the middle of the night because they’re packed in the suitcase right at the back!
6. Make things accessible for the kids
Whilst we’re talking about making things easier in the car, we actually bought some “backseat organisers” for the girls. They went over mine and Dan’s seats and allowed the girls to have their drinks, snacks, books, toys and iPads easily accessible for them without disturbing me and Dan. Not only did this make them more independent (which they love!!) but also it genuinely did keep the car tidier! Driving back in the day, we did rely on the iPads to pass the time for the girls and the backseat organisers we bought meant that the girls could watch them hands-free with their headphones and plugged in to keep those batteries up too! It also made the trip feel a bit more special, as if we were on a plane, because ultimately who doesn’t love in-flight entertainment!
7. Update your game repertoire!
If we weren’t listening to music or watching iPads, we were playing games on our trip! Once we had done the usual “I spy” and “Who can spot _____?” we tried a few new ones! One of our favourite games, which we’ve played for a while now, is “Guess the …..”. We usually play it as “Guess the Animal” where you ask yes/no questions to guess the person’s animal, but we also used Disney characters and story characters too. If your kids are older, you could adapt it to include anything but with ours being 3 and 5, we tried to keep it to things that they could actually guess!
I also bought Brain Quest Trivia for our 5 year old which kept her (and us) busy for the majority of the vacation. She was able to read the questions to us, and we were also able to quiz her and our three year old for hours, whether in the car or at a restaurant, or just by the pool at the Air B’n’B. We also took along our trusty Dobble (Spot it in USA) and Uno card games which are always easy to pack and fun to play!
8. Take some cash
This is an essential that we learned the hard way on our road trip! Living in a virtually cashless city, we never carry cash. In fact, I have only used an ATM once since we moved to Chicago last year! It didn’t even cross our minds that we would need cash, especially with so many places switching to card only thanks to Covid. However, one place that hasn’t quite cottoned on to the whole “pay by card” option is the toll roads! Whilst we are able to pay most of our tolls online, we did encounter one quite cross lady at a toll booth when we told her we didn’t have any cash! Thankfully there was a little hut where we could pay the toll by card, but the eyes of doom that she gave us when she had to deviate from her usual “that’s $2.25 please” is enough to make sure that we take cash for tolls every time we travel now!
9. Share the driving
For us, we found it essential to share the driving on our road trip. Between entertaining the kids and feeding snacks to the driver, being a passenger certainly wasn’t the easy option. But driving and staying 100% alert on the straightest roads is a tough job. At one point, we drove on the same road for 670 miles! That is no mean feat! We swapped driver a few times when we stopped to refuel the car or stretch our legs and it definitely made it a more pleasant journey for everyone. Even if you think you are doing ok, make sure to build in those breaks if you’re travelling alone, or swap drivers if you can as trust me, you are way more tired than you think!
10. Soak it all up!
For us, one of the biggest draws of moving to Chicago from England (read about our move here) was the opportunity to do these big road trips and see things we have never seen before. If we drove for 14 hours from our house in England, we’d probably be in the most northerly part of Scotland at the other end of the country! And yet here, we have barely scratched the surface of this vast country! So try to stop and capture those moments, enjoy the sunsets in the rearview mirror, wonder at the size of all the other vehicles on the road! Particularly after a year of being able to travel very little, (and we did more than most by moving here), it was so very very special to be able to travel across the country and experience so many new things! We’re already planning our next trip and can’t wait to get back on the road again!
