Some time ago I asked for ideas to keep kids entertained while traveling cross country and since everyone was so helpful, I thought I would share our experience and what was particularly helpful. For some background, we have four kids (boy-11, girl-9, boy-7, and girl 6) as well as 2 dogs, one cat and a guinea pig. We traveled almost 2,000 miles from Texas to our new home in Maryland. It was a stressful trip but many of your ideas really helped the trip along.
Thanks to NicoleJ for the link:
MomsMinivan.com - 101 Car Games, Travel Games and Road Trip Games for Kids -- Printable Road Trip Activities
I went there and printed out all of the free printables I could and made an activity booklet for each of the children. One of the activities was liscence plate bingo where you color off each state when you see a car from that state. I had bought small plastic trophies to give to each of the children when they finished the map but simply told them to bring me the completed map for a surprise. They had a lot of fun with that one.
I also broke down and bought a DVD player for the car. It was very helpful, especially after the trip. We had to live in a motel room for 20 days while waiting for a house assignment, so being able to watch our movies gave the kids some sense of stability. In relation to buying the DVD player... I did some research before buying one and am very grateful. I had wanted to buy one of those dual screen jobs but discovered that it is very common for one of the screens to fail. We bought a Sony 9 inch and it is just great. It has even survived a few hard falls. We also bought a few new movies that were only to be viewed after starting the trip.
The rest of the trip was a nightmare, but had nothing to do with the kids, just time and circumstances.
One thing I highly recommend when traveling with kids... talk to them and let them know what to expect. This really helped with our kids. We also tried to limit the days travel to 500 miles. We should have made it 400 instead, but wanted to get the trip over with. We camped out every night which gave the kids and animals a chance to stretch their legs.
Again, thanks for all the great ideas!
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