How to road trip with your kids and live to tell the tale

Did you know? The National Park Foundation’s “Every Kid in the Park” program offers fourth graders and their families free entrance to the nation’s national parks for a full year!  Visit https://www.nationalparks.org/our-work/campaigns-initiatives/every-kid-park to help your rising fourth grader participate in the simple program and get your free printable pass now. Have a rising fifth grader? Don’t worry! You can still enjoy the benefits of “Every Kid in the Park” until the end of August. There’s also a way for educators to share the program with their grade four classes. Start adventuring! (Image: Shenandoah National Park, public domain)

Every February, sick of snow and ice, my husband Mark and I start dreaming up summer road trips. We dream of new destinations, packing light, and hitting the road to enjoy long, lazy summer days with our three kids 12, 10, and 8. Then June rolls around and we’re busy confirming reservations, making arrangements for our menagerie of pets, and packing up half our house into an eight-passenger mini-van. There’s February-dreaming, and then there’s reality.

This summer we planned a two-week trip that included three stops in Pennsylvania and Virginia, plus a week-long visit with family in Michigan. While we’ve taken many long drives with our kids—14 hours to the Outer Banks, 8 to DC, 14 to Michigan twice a year—never have we planned a trip in which so much of the activity involves driving to our next stopping point. A multiple-stop trip is a different creature than a week-long stay on the ocean, and we learned a few things along the way. Some of the lessons came in the form of small victories, such as betting our money on a seemingly overpriced tour of Luray Caverns outside Shenandoah National Park, which turned out to be a highlight for all of us. Other lessons came as small failures, such as thinking we could depend on the various wayside stores inside the national park to supply all our grocery needs. Selection at these stores was limited, so we ended up spending a small fortune dining out every night.

On top of the daily unpredictability of accommodations, road conditions, weather, and food options, there was the usual unpredictability of traveling with kids. Would they get along in the car all those hours? Would they be interested in the history of Gettysburg National Park or the pastoral scenery of Lancaster County? Would they fall asleep and stay asleep in the close quarters of a hotel room?

We didn’t know, but we were willing to give it a college try. We got the kids pumped months in advance, planning the things we’d do and mapping out our route together. By the end of our actual trip, my husband and I found ourselves assessing the damage, both financial and relational. It was expensive. It was often tense. But it was also a whole lot of fun. While we’re not road trip experts, here’s what we learned en route.

Give the kids a voice in the planning process. A family vacation, as we parents all know, is not actually a vacation for the parents. It’s just the regular family chaos with a change of zip code. When kids participate in the planning stage, they remind you of what really matters to them on a road trip. The hotel needs a pool. It also needs a restaurant within walking distance, because they do not want to get back in the car to find dinner once they arrive. Furthermore, there should be cool things to do, not just pleasant drives with scenery to look at. We learned that all the national parks have junior ranger programs. On the second day of our stay in Shenandoah, after completing an activity book about the park and attending a talk on bears, our kids were officially sworn in as junior park rangers. They thought this was great. And so did we.

Create a spending budget ahead of time, and if your kids are old enough to make sense of it, don’t hesitate to share it with them in the form of a pre-planned itinerary. That way, our kids who all either read or understand visuals on billboards didn’t have to beg us to stop at every appealing tourist trap along the way. And instead of saying, “It’s too expensive,” which is a downer on a family vacation, we had a concrete plan to offer them ahead of time. Still, plans have to change sometimes. In Lancaster, we ran out of time for the Strasbourg Railroad. That was a big letdown for two of our littles, but small life disappointments can actually be good for kids, since research shows when kids learn to navigate little letdowns, they build resilience for bigger challenges later in life.

Pack enough snacks. And by enough, I mean a laundry basket full. Our snack laundry basket rode in style like a sixth passenger, buckled into a captain’s chair in the second row of our minivan. With enough apples, bananas, granola bars and crackers, we avoided stopping at fast food restaurants, staved off a few hangry outbursts when traffic delayed our meal stops, and supplied our little hikers with extra sustenance after their long treks through the forest. I generally avoid buying single-serving snacks because of extra packaging and cost. But on a road trip like this, I make the exception. The kids love it because it feels like a special treat to enjoy their own self-selected flavor of goldfish crackers. Plus, there’s no fighting over who got the most.

Consider hitting grocery stores instead of restaurants for breakfast and lunch. This is a staple on every trip we take; we’ve even done this in New York City. With gluten and dairy-free family members, it can be tricky (and expensive) ordering from a menu three times a day. With a small cooler or backpack, we can squeeze in a couple meals on the go or turn a meal into a fun picnic stop.

Don’t drive more than five or six hours in one day. A friend who road trips cross-country with her family each year shared this. We broke that rule during one leg of our trip to avoid another hotel stay between Virginia and Michigan, but that’s only because, as I mentioned earlier, we’d already spent more on food than we intended. Also, those of us living or traveling on the East Coast know that anytime Waze tells you your trip will take 5.5 hours, you can be sure a major traffic jam running the length of the northeastern seaboard will spontaneously spring up the moment you leave your driveway. Five and a half hours quickly becomes eight when you add in potty and fuel stops. But in general, following my friend’s seasoned advice proved helpful. The kids do much better when they have a finite understanding of where we’re headed and when we’ll get there. We could tell them, “We’ll be there in about the length of a school day.”

And…drum roll, please…the last and most generic, but probably most valuable lesson we learned along the way (something I've written about before): “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” It turns out our son doesn’t love hiking. “Hike is a four-letter word,” concluded my husband at the end of our trip. And Gettysburg was interesting, but it was also a lot of driving. By Friday morning as we packed up for our week in Michigan, we were ready to stay in one place for a while. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have an amazing time.

For every disagreement we navigated along the way, for every mile we logged as pack mules carrying Kaleb to a summit, for every bear we thought we heard but never saw, and for every stranger’s head we turned yelling, “Kaleb, stop!” as he skimmed a little too close to a cliff’s edge, there were views of rolling farmland, cascading waterfalls, and panoramas of the Blue Ridge mountains that took our breath away. One night we climbed to the clifftop behind our hotel to watch the sunset in the west while a thunderstorm simultaneously rolled in from the east—stunning. On the way down, hundreds of lighting bugs danced in the fading light of the meadows.  We played Yahtzee and Memory and ate five-layer chocolate cake on the balcony of the lodge restaurant during a dinner we didn’t have to cook or clean up, then warmed up from the cool night air by a roaring fire in the lodge’s historic great room, and later enjoyed silly, uproarious laughter in the tight quarters of our hotel room about all the things kids think are hilarious. All these little moments add up to the gift of sharing wonder and beauty with our kids, exploring together how wide and varied and precious is this planet we call home.

Was it stressful? Ask the poor woman whose face I accidentally screamed in when trying to alert Mark that Kaleb was once again getting too close to the edge. We were having a pleasant chat with her and her friends because we kept bumping into them on our hikes and even at dinner one evening. I’m sure she found my unexpected shriek in the middle of her story a bit unnerving. But she was gracious. And yes, by that last day, my nerves were a little shot.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. Maybe next time, we’ll trek a little further, stay a little longer, and maybe, just maybe, Kaleb won’t yell, “No!” any time someone drops the “h-word.”