Our Family of seven just got home from a 14-day trip to Colorado, which involved over 40 hours of driving, two nights in hotels, 10 nights in a tent at 3 different campgrounds, over 18 miles of hiking and around 98 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We had so much fun, and we didn’t need a week to recover.
If you want to know our best tips and secrets to loving your vacations with your kids, follow along as I spend a few posts telling more about this amazing trip.
My absolute #1 tip for traveling with kids is… screen time.
We generally allow relatively little screen time on a regular day of the week. The kids typically only get screen time for a few hours on Saturday morning and family movie nights. So they look forward to road trips since they get unlimited screen time. Each of the kids has their own Kindle Fire. The fire is very affordable, comes with a ton of storage space, and you can choose from a vast array of fun, kid-proof cases on Amazon. They each download their own favorite games, Kindle books, Audible books, and movies from the streaming services we have.
Of course, screen time doesn’t appeal as much to very young children. I would say it didn’t really entertain well until around age 3-5, depending on the kid. This is actually one reason why we waited until now to go out west. Along with wanting to wait until all our kids could actually hike without being carried a lot, we also knew they needed to be able to be entertained for such a long drive.
When the kids were smaller, we stuck to shorter trips of 5- 10 hours.
Tip # 2- Always bring lots of snacks
For those younger kids and really for everyone, always bring snacks and water. Rest stops are your friend. It a great way for everyone to get a bathroom break, and the kids can even run out some energy before setting back out again.
We spent two days driving each way.
On the way west, we did a 5-hour day with a stop to see family and a 15-hour day. With stops, our 15 hours of driving came in at around 17 actual hours. We were excited to have made such good time.
We stopped to eat a sack breakfast (courtesy of my MIL) under the St. Louis arch, and we had B.B.Q. lunch in Kansas City.
We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner in the car and pulled into Denver around 9 P.M. Mountain daylight time.
On the way home, we split the trip more evenly with 10 hours the first day and 11 the second. Both days we made great time again, and even with “losing” two hours coming back to eastern time, we didn’t drive a single minute in the dark. We got to our hotel in Topeka, Kansas, at 6 p.m. the first day, and we got home around 8 p.m.
I was actually a little surprised by how well the driving portion of the trip went. I expected more meltdowns and whining.
Our youngest ended up with car sickness on the way west. We had to stop in the middle of nowhere for me to clean up his car seat. The other kids spend the time well, running up and down a hill at the exit. We have three kids who are prone to carsickness, like their mama, and we like to use children’s Dramamine. Weirdly, I often forget to give it to them. Needless to say, I remembered better for the rest of the trip.
The carsickness was the only hiccup in the whole drive both ways.
Check back soon for more details on the fun part of the vacation.
