Guest Blogger: Paige Rangel
The ironic thing is, I personally have always hated road trips. But then again, when it comes to the cost of airline travel, on top of renting a car, and then hotels, we just couldn’t make that work for our budget. Plus, we love visiting our family in Colorado and we don’t get to do it often enough! When we drive, we not only save on the cost of flights, but we automatically have our own vehicle to get us around. Which is especially important to us since we planned to take this extended stay for a month here! And we can stay with family [both sets of grandparents live here], which is awesome.
The last time we made this extended trip was two years ago. Back then, I wrote this post about some of the tips and tricks to road trips with kids. It’s crazy to me that it’s been two years since then! I’ve for sure learned some more helpful summer road trip ready tips since then, so I wanted to share them now!
Getting the Car Prepared Before
As I wrote about a little in this recent post, there are a lot of little things to consider and take care of before leaving for a month. One of the things that my husband is always really good about taking care of is making sure my mom car is in tip top shape before we go. We got all new Bridgestone tires recently, and we also had a little tune-up with Firestone Complete Auto Care. I can’t even image having car troubles with three little ones in the car, so thank goodness he is on top of it!
Keeping the Kids Busy
It’s really important to me as mom and co-pilot/keeper-of-the-peace/snack-getter, etc. to find things to keep the kids busy. Our drive was 16 hours, which we broke up over two days! We purposefully did not get an in-car entertainment system in our car when we purchased it, because we never wanted that to become a habit for the kids to be watching all the time. I am all about the iPad and using that for some entertainment. But I believe there are so many other things that kids can do besides screen time! So for this trip, I went on a little Amazon shopping spree for portable kids’ toys, books, and games. If there’s any interest, I will share the specific details of our favorites in a later post.
My #momhack was to get them all new books, toys, and games so everything felt fresh and exciting. Then I went to Target and found these cute little tins with dividers in the dollar section to keep it all organized while we were on the go! But you could easily do this same thing with any other type of storage container like a shower caddy or basket. Then I filled it all up with toys specifically for each kid and put their names on it. I had these waiting by the door for them when they woke up on the morning of our trip. They couldn’t wait to get into them!
One friend had suggested packing all these car activities in their backpacks. But since this was a longer trip for us, I asked the kids to each pack some of their favorite toys in their backpacks to play with once we got to our final destination. There aren’t really any toys at the grandparent’s house, so this way they had some more fun for when we arrived!
If you’re family is getting ready for a road trip this summer, be sure to check out Firestone Complete Auto Care before you go! Firestone Complete Auto Care backs all of their work with a Triple Promise that guarantees your experience will be Fixed Right, Priced Right, and Right on Time.
And as promised, here is the link for you to download some coupons to save on your next visit to Firestone Complete Auto Care.
