Rving with Kids – "Are We There Yet" ??

We spent two very long days on the road coming back from Florida recently. 480 miles one day and 525 the next. Normally we don’t like to drive that many miles in one day, but we had to work within the confines of our school calendar. With two kids in middle school, they aren’t able to miss school like they could when they were younger.

Some of the things that work for long driving days with my family are:

~ Books. Sounds simple, but there is nothing like having a good book to keep the kids occupied. My older girls love reading and selected their own books to bring along. My 7 year old son and I picked out a few books for him together. He reads on his own but prefers it when we read together. My husband also likes to bring along audio books on cd. We can borrow them from our local libray.

~ Art supplies. We love the Color Wonders products. The kids can sit at the dinette and create their masterpieces. If the markers slip when we hit a bump it won’t leave marks on the table. By the time we get to our destination we have a whole stack of drawings to pass out.

~ DVDs. Sometimes kids just want to watch tv and be lazy. It’s hard not to feel that way when spending a whole day in the motorhome. I pick up a few movies that they haven’t seen before so they have something new to keep their attention. Sometimes I try to tie it into our location. Last summer we drove through Iowa just to see the Field of Dreams from the Kevin Costner movie of the same name. It took awhile, but we finally found the movie on dvd and the kids watched it a couple of times before we got to the field. They were pretty excited to see it in person by the time we got there. (I’m going to do a seperate article about that in the future.)

~ Snacks. If you have kids (or husbands), you will need snacks! We try to stick to things that are easy to eat while sitting at the table in a moving motorhome. Our favorite snacks while on the road are Cheez-Its, Cheerios, trail mix, raisins, apples and bananas, cheese sticks, and those 100 calorie snack packs.

~ Laptop. We need to bring our laptop along for work but the kids are only too happy to use it. They all have their favorite websites they like to visit. The girls like to send e-mails to their friends too. Keeping in touch with friends is important to them. We have an inverter that we plug into the 12 volt outlet at the dinette table and I have an anti slip map that I put under the laptop to keep it from sliding across the table while we are moving.

~Games. We have the usual assortment of board and card games. But we like playing other type of games while driving. We play the license plate game where we have to find a license plate from each state. One on trip to FL we found 49 of them and were only missing Rhode Island (we even found Alaska and Hawaii !). This site has many printable travel games which will keep you busy for hours.

I will be sure to pass along anything new that looks interesting.

Until next week,

Shannone