Travel Tips: Road Trips & Plane Flights with Kids
We have been on more road trips in the car and flights on airplanes with our kids than I can remember. Just on our latest vacation alone, there are 7 different plane flights! We have driven through many states visiting National Parks, have driven from Pennsylvania to Florida, taken a 14 hour drive exploring the Road to Hana in Maui, and we drove an RV through 6 states in a week. We are no strangers to finding ways to keep our kids from killing each other during these situations.
Here are some of our favorite travel tips for road trips & plane flights with kids
Let’s face it, most of the scenery type of sightseeing is for the benefit of us as parents. By the time we get to the 10th waterfall, the kids are over it. So the trick is, how do we keep them occupied and happy while we can explore the sights that we want to see even if it takes 14 hours of driving around checking things out?
These tips can be helpful both for the basic transportation types of road/plane trips (AKA getting from point A to point B), and they are also useful for exploration types of road trips.
1. “The Space Bag”
This is an idea that I stole from my own childhood, and it still does the trick decades later. Some things never go out of style. The general idea is that you get a bunch of little things that the kids would want (small toys, candy, craft supplies, notebooks, coloring book, markers, stickers, books, etc) & you wrap each individual item in aluminum foil (that’s why we call it a Space Bag because anything shiny is obviously related to space exploration, right?).
The best part of the Space Bag is that you get to set a specific timeframe for opening the next item, depending on the age of the kids and the time in the car/plane. You can even tie it in to a behavior system if that’s how you roll. When the kids were younger, we would set a timer (depending on the length of the drive and the number of items) for, let’s say, every 30 minutes. The kids would then open one of their items when the timer went off.
The Space Bag gave them something to look forward to and also kept them busy and entertained.
2. “Treat Tickets”
We came up with this idea years ago before our Florida road trip. Vacations and junky treats tend to go hand in hand for our family, so we wanted to tie this in to a system where the kids would earn their treats for expected behaviors. For this particular trip, I had cut out little pieces of colored paper and put Disney stickers on them. Each of the kids had a little pouch to hold their tickets.
We had behaviors that we expected (mostly involving not fighting with each other, which is always our biggest issue). The kids could earn and lose tickets based on certain behaviors. They would then be able to use those tickets to “buy” treats that they wanted during the trip (for example, ice cream might “cost” 5 tickets).
This system worked really well for us when the kids were about 5-8 years old. They completely bought in to it, and looked forward to earning and using their tickets. It also had the added benefit of limiting the “I want that” syndrome every time they would see a treat that they wanted. They knew that they had only a limited number of tickets to “spend” and that the treats were not unlimited.
3. Electronics and Car Chargers
This one is a no brainer for our kids at their ages. They have a whole array of electronic gadgets to keep them busy and entertained. The current favorites are Nintendo 3DS and ipods. Headphones are a must. And mobile/car chargers because God forbid one of these devices runs out of battery. I’m not sure how we would survive.
We’ve never had a fancy car with a built in DVD player, but at one point in time we purchased the portable kind that you can attach to the backs of the front headrests. That thing was a PITA, although it did get us through some tough drives when the kids were really little. In fact, I reluctantly admit that we originally bought the thing in the first place after we were so desperate on our way to the shore stuck in heavy traffic that we pulled in to the first Best Buy that we found and paid full price for that sucker. Something I would never ever do under normal circumstances (desperation can cause erratic behavior).
Depending on the length and impetus for the trip (sightseeing or transportation) we may try to limit the amount of electronic use and try to bust out the things that good parents do (like make them read books).
4. Games
So this is one of those things that we all know is a good parenting thing to do. I wonder how many of us feel guilty that we aren’t encouraging the kids to put down the electronics to hold hands and sing round robin songs in the car (maybe while mom knits a sweater out of organic wool in the front seat?). High expectations, anyone? Games sometimes fall into that “perfect family” scene that makes us feel like crap in comparison. Well, I have an idea that sometimes works for us.
Pick one “family game” and try it out. You can find about a million ideas on Pinterest (don’t let it make you feel like a bad person though…you are too busy planning and executing vacations to knit stuff or paper mache anything).
Some of the simple ones we’ve done is “find all of the license plates” and “find the alphabet in order on road signs”. No knitting or craft supplies needed. The toy company Melissa & Doug makes this cool and simple thingy to track your license plate finding.
What are some of your favorite tips for road trips or flights with the kids?