I love the adventure of setting off on a road trip. It’s an exhilarating feeling to drive out of town with a full tank of gas and no obligation to be back for the next few days. Sure, a road trip with a toddler and infant isn’t as epic as a backpacking trip or some other high-intensity activity, but sometimes it’s okay to enjoy tame adventures–like when you have a month-old baby and a postpartum mama who’s not supposed to be hiking much yet. I’m glad for any activity we can do as a family right now, especially when it involves seeing lots of lovely fall colors.
I know some people shy away from taking their kids on long car rides on the assumption that it would be more stressful than relaxing, but road trips are totally possible even if you have toddlers or young kids. With a little foresight and a lot of patience, they can be enjoyable for everyone.
We’ve spent the past two weekends out of town. LONG weekends: we were only home 2 days in between trips. If we can take road trips with a very active 2 year-old and a 1 month-old baby, pretty much anyone can!
1. Start with a list: specifically, a “Road Trip with a Toddler” list!
This is something I wish I’d done earlier. Like I said, our family has spent the past two weekends away from home, with only two days in the middle to catch up on laundry, cooking, sleep…
Both trips were last-minute opportunities, so planning ahead wasn’t really an option. That’s why we ended up stopping for diapers and TP on our way out of town. But hey, at least we didn’t run out a hundred miles from the grocery store! (Yes, we were that far from civilization.)
Still, I’d rather have it with me before we leave the driveway. That’s why I made a list of basic car trip/camping supplies BEFORE the next unexpected trip comes up. As I mentioned earlier, make sure the list includes everything you will need for a road trip with a toddler, or whatever age your kids are. Little ones seem to require extra things that are easy to forget!
The tricky part about making a master list is that road trips can require different supplies depending on whether you will be camping, staying someplace with complete amenities, or something in between the two. I would err on the side of making the list too detailed, just so important things like TP don’t get forgotten when we do need them! That being said, my master list for road trips is pretty much a camping list. It includes bedding and cooking equipment in addition to more basic things like diapers and a change of clothes.
2. Keep meals simple and quick to prepare
While we’re on the subject of packing, let’s talk about meals. The great thing about road trips is that you can pack as much food as will fit in your cooler. No worrying about weight, or minimizing perishable items so they won’t spoil.
Obviously, the number and type of meals you will need depend on the destination and whether or not you’re camping. If you only need to pack lunches, find foods that can be prepared ahead of time and eaten cold (like sandwiches), or eaten straight from a container. This eliminates cooking and cleanup, which can take more time than you think. These kinds of foods should also be less messy–which is a huge bonus on a road trip with a toddler, believe me!.
Suppertime
For suppers, the best meals for us tend to be something prepared in advance that can easily be reheated in a pot or skillet over a camp stove. Soups, one-pot meals, and casseroles are good options. Don’t underestimate the power of leftovers! When you’ve been on the road all day, a hot supper of leftover baked spaghetti or soup tastes fantastic! Also, it leaves you with only one messy cooking pot to clean.
Tip: if you’re reheating a casserole or one-pot meal, you may need to add a little water to the pot to keep the food from drying out and burning.
Any desserts I pack are self-contained, like cookies or brownies. These don’t require bowls and spoons–which would need to be washed afterward.
Breakfast
When we pack breakfasts for road trips, that usually means we’re camping or staying in a cabin somewhere. We really appreciate hot breakfasts when camping, although the quick and easy option would be cereal or granola bars.
Also, my husband usually cooks breakfast on camping trips, and I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to wake up to the smell of coffee and bacon from the comfort of my sleeping bag!
At breakfast time, we stick to the “one pot plus a coffee pot” rule. You can cook bacon and eggs in the same pan, with a little practice. Cook the bacon first, then push it to the side of the pan when it’s mostly cooked. Then pour the eggs in. Scrambled works best here.
Otherwise, a pot of oatmeal is a good choice, especially on chilly mornings. I like to mix quick oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins at home, so I have a family-size portion ready to pour into the pot when the water boils.
3. Bring snacks
While not necessarily an actual meal, snacks play an important part in our road trips. Before we had kids, snacks could be a substitute for lunch. Toddlers need more structured meals than that, though. With kids, the role of road trip snacks is largely entertainment: it gives them something else to think about other than being stuck in a car seat.
Now, I would not recommend giving your kids snacks all day on a regular basis, but on road trips it is an effective strategy for preserving harmony. That becomes more important when you’re stuck in a small space with small, loud people.
When choosing snacks to bring along on a road trips with a toddler or young kids, I stick to mostly healthy choices plus one treat. For example, we often take dried fruits, nuts, granola bars, and a bag of cookies or candies. Another good option is to make a big bag of trail mix. That’s handy because you have fewer open packages floating around in the car.
If our driving time is less than five hours, snacks are probably the only car food I will pack. On shorter trips like this, the snacks look less like backpacking food and more like our normal lunches: fresh fruit and vegetables (cut up beforehand, if necessary), muffins or sandwiches, cheese or nuts, and maybe cookies.
After several messy lunches on the road, I’ve given up bringing along homemade sandwich bread. It’s just too crumbly for the car! Instead, we can make sandwiches with buns or bagels.
4. Bring something to listen to
Music is another good distraction when kids get cranky. These days, you have several different options for listening. There’s the radio, if you can get stations to come in where you’re driving. You might be surprised if the only station available is local folk music–or nothing at all.
There’s also Internet radio, if you have a way to play it in your vehicle, or a device with a way to charge it. However, you also need to be able to access the Internet, and our service tends to be spotty or nonexistent frequently. Maybe that’s because most of our road trips happen to be driving through long stretches of Alaskan wilderness.
A final option is bringing a device with music loaded onto it, or physical CDs (or cassettes, if your vehicle is old enough!) We take the old-school approach and keep a stack of CDs in our truck. It keeps me from getting hoarse singing “Over the River and Through the Woods” again and again and again.
Now, music isn’t the only thing you can listen to. Books on tape/CD/whatever are a good alternative, especially if your kids are older. Toddlers aren’t as interested if they can’t see the pictures. Lectures on Philosophy or Economics might be interesting to parents, but good luck hearing them over the kids. (Or if your kids are like mine, talks might put them to sleep!)
5. Give them something to look for
Older kids can play games in the car, but toddlers are a little young for that. One way to keep them engaged is to have them look for some landmark, animal, or special vehicles on the road (tractors, obviously).
If you’ve made the drive before and know what’s coming up soon, that makes it easy. If this is a journey into unknown territory for you, look on a map (or your phone) to find landmarks or natural features like rivers, lakes, and mountains.
Animals can be fun to spot, but it can also be very frustrating to kids if they DON’T see whatever it is they’re looking for. We have made the mistake of telling our two year-old to look for bears, and then he didn’t see any all day. We had better success with moose.
Looking for a certain kind of vehicle may be more applicable if you’re traveling on a busy highway. Little boys are probably more interested in pointing out tractors and dump trucks, but little girls could be engaged to find baby blue or yellow cars.
6. Streamline your stops
Stops are inevitable on a road trip with a toddler or young child, so it’s a good idea to be prepared for them. That means having a plan so that each stop doesn’t take an hour. I’m not talking about a rigid, down-to-the-minute schedule–just a basic idea of what needs to happen before everyone gets back in the car.
It may not seem important to have a plan, but it’s so easy to get caught off guard by things like, “Wait, did we change both kids’ diapers, or just the baby’s?”
For our family right now, having a plan pretty much means I feed the baby whenever we stop, and my husband is in charge of anything else that needs to happen. On our last two road trips with the kids, he changed the two year-old’s diapers and ran around with him outside every time we stopped.
If you have kids of several different ages, you could put each older kid in charge of a younger sibling during stops. That way, everyone gets a bathroom break and nobody wanders off by himself. (This only works if you have kids old enough to take responsibility for someone else.)
7. Lower your standards… at least for sleep
If your road trip includes a night or more away from home, be prepared to miss some sleep. If you have young children, you already know that ANYTHING outside their normal routine can disrupt their sleep. Spending hours stuck in a car seat, coupled with going to bed in a strange place–maybe even without a bed, if you’re camping–is a recipe for a bad night.
I don’t say this to turn you away from attempting a road trip with a toddler or baby. Not at all. I just personally find it easier to accept the fact that I probably won’t sleep before it happens, rather than be unpleasantly surprised. I figure one night of poor sleep is nothing to sneeze at. Two, and I start getting grumpy if I don’t get any coffee. Three, and I tell my husband no more trips for a while…
8. Stay flexible and remember it’s an adventure!
Last on my list, but probably one of the most important tips for traveling with kids: leave some wiggle room in your plans, and keep a sense of humor. You never know what might come up and throw a wrench in your plans. From unexpected sicknesses or injuries to flat tires or the steering rack coming loose in the middle of a deep canyon with scree slopes on both sides of the road, you can’t be prepared for everything.
One of the most important things you can do in a situation like that (besides attending to the immediate need) is to keep the atmosphere positive. The last thing you want is the entire family stressed and in tears. Remember it’s all part of the adventure.
These are my recommendations to make your road trip with a toddler less of a headache and more of a pleasant experience. It’s not as hard as it seems to enjoy traveling with young kids; you just need to have a game plan. I hope you find my tips helpful. If you have any other suggestions for traveling with children, leave a comment below. I would love to hear from you!
For more ideas about simplifying and streamlining your day-to-day life, check out this post on developing a simple meal plan.
Leave a Reply