10. Use a different route on the return trip.
Loops double the excitient of almost any road trip. If you're looking at the same stuff (only backwards) that you looked at when you set out on your adventure, the message to the kids will be clear: We're done, we're going home now, the fun is over. Don't let the return trip cut your vacation short.
Here's a fun loop to Glacier National Park from Missoula, MT.
The Sealy Lake and Swan Lake Vallley is a great return route after heading north into the Mission Valley. Stay the first night in Big Fork and head out first thing in the morning to Glacier. Stay a night or two in the park, and head out to Whitefish for a night and then drive back to Missoula through the Sealy/Swan Valley. And look for the Giant cow where 83 meets 200.
The history of the mountains is really neat along this loop. Like the rest of the rocky mountains, these mountains were formed by earthquakes, and then shaped by glaciers. The Mission mountains are the face of a huge fault line that FAULTED (7.5). Whith a drastic drop, the Missions were formed. But the cool part comes up later in their life; when they met the big glacier of the north. The glacier, which filled the rocky mountain trench (it extends up through British Columbia and into the Yukon) flowed south carving a valley with it until it reached the Mission Mountains. There was a flurry of excitement, but eventually, a compromise was reached. The great compromise consisted of two parts:
1. The Mission Mountains would split the glacier in two, forcing it to fork down the Mission valley and the Sealy/Swan valley
2. The glacier could take as much of the Mission Mountains with it as it could carry.
And so it did, down to around Ronan. That's why the Mission Mountains north of Ronan are very round, (because the glaciers covered then and rounded their tops) and the mountains south of Ronan are so jagged (because the big glacier didn't make it that far).
Read this great article A Freak Preserved by an Accident: The Making of Flathead Lake. It was written by one of my old Geology professors, Dave Alt.
Showing posts with label 10 Tips for Road Tripping with Kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 10 Tips for Road Tripping with Kids. Show all posts
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#9)
Night time is the right time to make up miles if you need to. So set yourself up for success and take care of the little things
The ninth in our ongoing series of travel-tested tips for road trips with kids.
Tip #9. Let sleeping kids lay
Gas up after dinner and make sure you've got everything you need because once the kids fall asleep, you can really make some miles disappear. Oddly enough, we've found there to be a Starbucks mightily near many Cracker Barrel restaurants. It also makes some great private time for Mom and Dad to have a nice adult conversation. If the kids wake up, it can put a damper on things, so take care of the little stuff, and let sleeping kids lay.
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#8)
We're all for trying out local restaurants and hotels, but sometimes you've got to stick to what's predictable. Because let's face it, road trips with kids aren't.
The eighth in our ongoing series on travel-tested tops for road trips with kids. Stick to what you know and trust:
Tip #8. Residence Inn and Cracker Barrel
Residence Inn is ubiquitous, very kid friendly, and has a breakfast bar in the lobby that is maybe not great, but its fine. Fresh fruit, cereal, espresso machine, english muffins, monster waffles, scrambled eggs, bacon... in other words, it's great for kids and fine for parents. And they allow dogs as well, which is important to many family road trippers. Maybe the best thing is the roominess of the suites. Kitchenette with dishwasher, bedroom, and two bathrooms in many... lot's of room to spread out and build pillow and blanket forts.
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#7)
Let it all hang out.
The seventh in our ongoing series of travel-tested road trip tips.
Tip #7. Travel comfortably
Loose-fitting jeans with a sweatshirt and comfy shoes (maybe even slippers). "Let" the kids wear their pajamas and slippers; bring along their pillow and a blanket for them to burrow down into.
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#6)
Snacks and meals can make or break your day. The secret to making time and miles fly is to make mealtime early and healthy snacks abundant.
This is the sixth installment in an ongoing series of travel-tested tips for road tripping with kids.
Tip #6. No-crash snack stash
What comes out of kids is directly related to what goes into them (I'm talking about behavior here, we're done with the puke discussion). Sugar-laden foods make them go up and down real fast (especially if they're strapped into the back seat). Snacks are a favorite time killer among kids (parents too), and that can be OK if you give them the right stuff.
- Fruit such as Clementines are yummy, healthful, and sufficiently messy to satisfy many kids. Cherries with pits are fun to spit, but they're a wicked choking hazard, so they're no good for young kids (make sure to give the kids a trash bag to spit the seeds into). Grapes and bananas are usually popular too. Two word tip: baby wipes
- Sugarless gum lasts long so it's a good investment in quiet time (you'll want to provide some sort of trash stash for gum disposal, if you're driving a rental, maybe it's not so important). Trident actually tastes good too.
- Altoids!
- Goldfish. A yummy snack that doesn't have a lot of bad stuff in it.
- Individual apple sauce cups.
- Animal Crackers
- Little creal boxes are much more fun to eat then a tupperware container with cereal in it.
- Other crackers
- Cheerios
- Beef jerky
- Peanut butter
- Cheese sticks
- Water is better than coke. Juice works well too, but even 100% pure juice has a lot of sugars in it, so make it a once or twice a day thing.
- Trail mix is a high protein snack with some M&M treats for the kids (I'm not a complete a sugar fascist).
- Fruit rolls
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#5)
Let's face it, at the end of a long day of driving, you need to unwind a little bit. And it's a good idea to hedge your bets in a strange town.
The fifth (so to speak) in our series of travel-tested road trip tips. This is our favorite tip, by the way...
Tip #5. Pack a flask!
...or a bottle of wine or some herbal tea. We're not in any way advocating drinking and driving. We are however advocating drinking after driving. After a long day of driving 
Pamper yourself, pack a flask (great martini recipe here). Don't have a flask? Get one here (this is a Christmas hint for any loved ones who happen to be reading this blog). If you opt for wine, don't forget the corkscrew, if Herbal teas are your bag, we recommend the custom blends at Montana Tea and Spice Trading. Specifically, Evening in Missoula, Night on Glacier Bay, and Wild West.
What unwinds your drive?
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.
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#3)
Sometimes you've got to take what they give you. In fact, all the time, you've got to take what they give you.
The third in our ongoing series of road trip tips. Most parents came to terms with the fact that they no longer have a life about three days into their first child. But many don't realize that this law transfers into roadtripping too. The drum roll please...
3. Don’t sweat the schedule
Schedule, schmedule. It's great to have goals, but the key to setting goals is to make sure they're realistic and achievable. Don't book a bunch of hotel rooms in advance only to cancel and pay the penalty. Book the room at supper time the night you want to stay there. We like to stay at Residence Inns by Marriott because they're very kid friendly, they allow dogs, and they're ubiquitous. Keep the 800 number handy and call ahead to see what's available and where.
Our kids are pretty road tested, so we can often get up to 500 miles in a day, but we feel lucky to pull off 350. Stop a lot, toss a ball or a Frisbee at the rest areas, walk the dog, and take what they give you. The point of a family vacation is to have fun, not to make time. If you really need to make up time, do it after supper when the kids fall asleep and you can drive without boring them silly.
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#2)
Forget about distracting the kids with a handful of vids; instead, keep them engaged with the real world. In fact, sometimes the whole family can actually learn something...
The second in our ongoing series of road trip tips. We've logged over 16,000 miles in the past four years with kids in the car (often with our 120 lb. Great Dane/German Shepard mix, the late, great Wookie).
2. Skip the DVDs, use books and other interactive media
DVDs make kids dumb, books don't. Puzzle-, coloring-, game-, and comic books can keep kids involved without creating that glazed-over vidiot look. A lot of times, we'll use a video as a reward for great behavior: at the end of the day, he can watch a movie. This works well because when it's dark in the van, it's hard to the read books. The down side is that movies keep kids awake.
The Klutz game book is a pretty good option (although there are lots of little game pieces that could get lost pretty quickly in the chaos of the backseat); there are quite a variety of activities in there. A yellow pad and a pencil keep Tommy busy for hours, but some kids may not be as enthralled with art as Tommy is. Magna-doodles are magnetic drawing slates that make learning to read and learning basic arithmetic fun. Etch-a-sketch works well (it helps if one of the parents is an etch-a-sketch wiz, as is Tinsley). A car seat tray is a convenient way to keep their toys, pencils, game pieces and goldfish off the floor.
One of the best tricks we've found is to give Tommy a road atlas with our route highlighted in yellow. As we make progress, Tommy tracks it with another highlighter pen (blue, green). Now, the signs and town names make a little more sense to him because he can see them out the window. And he doesn't have to ask "are we there yet?". Tip: don't try to share the atlas with your back seat adventurer, and don't get one with teeny maps, big maps are more interesting.
Tips for Road Tripping with Kids (#1)
Keep 'em on their toes, keep 'em busy, and take what they give you
As a magazine editor and photographer, I travel a lot for photo shoots. Sometimes I’m gone two weeks of the month, sometimes three. At first, it was cool flying around the country and staying in fancy hotels. But it really boiled down to eating overpriced hamburgers at the Marriott bar, watching a college basketball game that I cared nothing about, and having the same conversation with the bartender in Oregon that I had last month with the bartender in Akron. Not only was this excruciatingly boring for me, but it was tough on my wife, who was outnumbered at home by our two kids, Tommy (age 6) and Lilly (age 1-1/2). Because travel is part of the landscape in the magazine world, we came up with ways to embrace it rather than dread it.
Nowadays, if the shoot is within a thousand miles, we pack up the minivan and head out on an educational adventure: using indigenous food, music, architecture, and climate we teach the kids about American cultural and natural history. When you hear the Dixieland, taste the etouffee, and feel the humidity, the history makes a lot more sense. And how the Mississippi River works is a lot more interesting when taken in the context of steamboats and flood-plain farmers. I'm still shooting photos all day, but I get to sleep with my wife at night, have tickle fights with Tommy and change Lilly's diappers before Tinsley gets up in the morning. We've logged over 16,000 miles in the past four years with kids in the car (and often our 120 lb. Great Dane/German Shepard mix, the late, great Wookie).
1. Start ‘em young: travel early and often
The main challenges to traveling with kids are puke and boredom. First, the puke (see the below tips for combatting boredom). My defining moment as a Dad came on a road trip to Maine. Out of the darkness of the back seat came the words "My tummy's spinning..." We were able to get off the highway and into a parking lot, but the ralph started rolling before we could get poor Tommy to the bathroom. All we could do was reach into the backseat to let Tommy puke into our cupped hands. We'd throw the puke out the window and reach back for more. Let me repeat that last sentence, we'd throw the puke out the window and reach back for more (!). Sounds pretty bad, but at the time, it was the thing to do. Needless to say, now whenever I get on a plane I collect all of the barf bags within reach.
Too often parents to turn to drugs to solve their problems. Let me re-phrase that: it's common for parents to give their kids some sort of over-the-counter medication to solve the ailments of their children. For motion sickness, the drug of choice is often a sedative such as Dramamine. You don’t need to give your kids sedatives; it may help you in the short run, but it will hurt you and them in the long run. At least if you expect to take many road trips with them. Building immunity is a more permanent solution. Although it can be a little messy at first...
The puking will only last for a few trips; now Tommy can actually read, write and study road atlases while we drive. While you're weathering the puke storm, carry the aforementioned barf bags, and place them in the seat pocket in front of the potential puker. Extra large paper cups work well too (Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Jumbo Coke cups...). Car sickness advice form the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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