If you are nervous or overwhelmed to take your little ones travelling overseas, consider a weekend road trip as a practice run. Road trips are practical, inexpensive and as a bonus you don’t have to worry about going through airports or long flights. Having that flexibility to stop when you want to stop, speed up, or divert from your initial route, is priceless. With toddlers in tow your main goal will be to keep some peace in the car.
Here are our 7 Essential Survival Tips for going on a Road Trip with Toddlers:
1. Find out the time needed
Simply enter your destination into Google map and find out how long your road trip will take. Remember to also plan some FUN pit stops along the way. Search for fun things you can do along the way: picnic spots, a beach or a playground to break up the journey.
2. Bring Snacks (plenty of it)
Pack lots and lots of snacks from home. In the car, most kids can be bribed with snacks. Our go to snacks include sultanas, whole grain crackers, cheese and sliced fresh fruits. The last thing you want on a road trip is a sugar high kid. Avoid giving lollies and chocolates until you are at the destination.
Whatever your snack of choice is, choose one that doesn’t crumble much to avoid dirty car.
3. In car entertainment
Let toddlers look out the window and enjoy the sights. Before whipping out the Ipad (the last resort), try using some good old fashioned tricks like singing their favourite songs or turn on their songs collection. DO give in to playing Nursery Rhymes. Nursery rhymes is still 1,000 times better than whinging kids.
Then there are the activity or sticker books. Plus bring along whatever your kid likes to play with at home. It’s always a good idea to bring their comfort toys along on the road trip.
4. Take Breaks
You can’t expect toddlers to sit quietly for hours and hours. Ideally plan to stop every two hours. Sure this means taking longer to reach your destination, but these breaks is important for the driver too.
If you’re stopping by a restaurant, find an open restaurant. Don’t make toddlers sit down after hours of sitting down. Let them run around and burn off some energy.
5. Depart at the right time
Depending on how long your journey is, time yourself well. Best if you know your child will be in their best behaviour or sleeping for some portions of it. Most children happily naps in a moving car, so always time your trip to coincide with their nap time. That way, you know you would get at least an hour or two of quiet time. In our case, we choose to drive in the morning around 2 hours before Berlin’s nap time.
6. Have some backup
Namely roadside assistance and paper map. Make sure you have road side assistance included in the car’s insurance cover. Even though accidents rarely happen, you wouldn’t want to take any risks. Bring paper map in case you can’t get mobile phone signal.
7. If all else fails.. Pretend to sleep
During our England trip, we drove from Manchester to Oxford which should only take 3 hours but since we didn’t take in the factor of Saturday travel we were horrendously stuck in traffic for another hour or two in Oxford’s old town. For the sake of Berlin we soldiered on and put on a brave happy face for Berlin. To much our surprise even though we were stuck in the jam, Berlin happily amused himself looking out the window seeing pedestrians, cyclists and cars.
