Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#4)

No need to buy a kid-tough digital camera from Fischer-Price, get a five year old Canon PowerShot at your local pawn shop: the photo quality is better and they shoot videos as well... And don't forget a little something for yourself too!

The fourth in our series of travel-tested road trip tips.

Tip #4. Get a cheap digital camera for the kids
This is one we discovered on the road trip we took this past June. I had to shoot a house in western North Carolina and meet up with an author in Nashville to go over an article. We hooked up with another author in Washington DC on the way down and then another in Chapel Hill, NC, on the return trip. It was a pretty ambitious road trip which took over two weeks. We had basically stopped using the point and shoot Canon PowerShot (state of the art in 2000) in favor of a modern SLR (Canon 20D), so we let Tommy use the PowerShot to chronicle the road trip. It was a great idea, and I think it'll work for others too. You'll probably want to upgrade the card, and make sure you have a battery charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter. We downloaded the photos onto my laptop at the end of the day and had a fun family photo viewing session (which bought an hour away from the TV). Check out Tommy's photo gallery here. The real fun part is that the camera also shoots video shorts, which kept Tommy enthralled for the entire return trip. If you want to check out the Fischer-Price kid-tough camera look here. They're around $70, but I'll bet you can get a good used canon for the same or less.