10 Summer Road Trip Essentials | Survival Tips WITH Kids

If you are planning a family road trip this summer, you're going to want to keep watching this video because we've got lots of safety tips as well as ways to keep your children entertained while on the road. My husband and I went on a two-year road trip around Canada and the U.S. with our dog and our two-year-old daughter at the time. Two years is a long time to be on the road with the toddler. Some days we were on the road for eight to ten hours towing a travel trailer. We've learned a lot on the road and we want to help you plan a safe and enjoyable family road trip. The goal is to make the drive part of the fun experience of your trip. In this video, we're going to cover research and planning, how to pack smart, vehicle safety tips, keeping your kids engaged and educated, entertainment options, snacks and mealtimes, comfortable sleeping arrangements, capturing memories, flexibility, and patience. I have a hard time putting this finger up. Stops and breaks. Research and planning is part of the pre-trip stage where you and your family can sit down together and decide where you want to go, the places you want to stop at, the activities you want to do, the places you want to eat at, as well as those cheesy landmarks that you absolutely still have to see while you're on your trip. Here's what we do when we're planning our family road trips. We open up our maps and we input our starting destination as well as our end destination. This lets you know how long your total trip is going to be and then you can plan stops along the way. Download maps offline, that way if you do lose reception while you're on the road, you can still get to your destination. Because we have a small child, we aim to travel no more than five hours each day, but there have been some occasional days where we've traveled up to like eight hours, which I don't recommend doing often, but the tips that we're sharing in this video will help you get those extra long days as well. Research family-friendly destinations and attractions along the way so that you can get out and move your body. Kids need to move their body at least two hours every single day, so you want to make sure that you add in these stops along your journey. You can add in lookout points, hikes, beaches, even splash pads or cool playgrounds, anything that's gonna wear out your child so when they go back in the car they're gonna be ready for either a nap or just to chill out. And you can plan all these stops with your child, ask them what they would like to do along the way. Choose appropriate accommodations that cater to families. When we were traveling with our trailer, we would stop at RV parks or campgrounds that had pools, parks, even activities, as well as green spaces, and because we had a dog, dog parks were super handy as well. If you're choosing hotels, motels, guest houses, or rentals, be sure that they also cater to families and have things like even just a swimming pool to keep everybody entertained. Packing smart. Create a checklist for essentials like clothing, toiletries, medication, and an extra roll of toilet paper that you can keep in the car for on the road. You never know when nature calls. Organize your car specifically for being on the road so that you're not having to stop along the way and access like storage on the roof rack or in your trailer. Have your snacks nearby so that you can quickly grab them, or entertainment for the kids, or an extra sweater or pillow, etc. Pack your kids lunchbox for the day, but also have a cooler that has extra cold drinks and snacks for everyone. Bring an extra large container of water so you can refill everyone's water bottles in the car so you don't have to keep stopping along the way. Safety tips. We want to give a special thanks to NHTSA, who we are working with, to bring you these summer driving safety tips. NHTSA is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that helps to keep you and your family safe on the road. Your vehicle is the core, the foundation of any road trip, so you want to make sure that it performs well. Before you hit the road, get your car serviced. Regular maintenance such as tune-ups, oil changes, battery checks, and tire rotations keep your car safe. Honestly, the last thing you want on the road, especially when you have children, is to deal with tow trucks and mechanics. Owners don't always know that their vehicles have recalls and need repairs. NHTSA's VIN lookup tool lets you input a VIN number of any vehicle and check to see if it has had any recalls in the last 15 years. Check your tire pressure on all four tires, as well as your treadwear and your spare tire. The tire pressure for each tire on your vehicle is actually listed on the inside of the door of your vehicle. Don't rely on what it's saying just on the tire itself. Check your lights, wiper blades, and fluid levels. Also check your belt and hoses under the hood for any cracks or tears. And if you don't know how to do this yourself, ask a mechanic to do a walkthrough with you so that you can learn. We bring an air pump and a tire repair kit for additional safety. In case you run into any unexpected issues along your journey, be sure to have an emergency roadside kit. You can get a full list of what is included in this kit, as well as additional safety driving tips on the NHTSA website. I will link that below. Engage and educate. Encourage your kids to participate in the decision making for your trip. Use the journey of this adventure as a learning opportunity to educate your children. Bring specific tools like maps, measuring tapes, magnifying glasses, ask specific questions, even like relate specific places you're going or things you're doing to what they've been learning in school. You can even make a scavenger hunt so they can look for things along the way. Maybe that's like animals or certain landmarks or specific colors of things. Whatever it is, just be creative and have fun with it. At each stop, get your child to engage with their surroundings by writing out what they're experiencing or even drawing what they're seeing. You'll be surprised at what they come up with. Entertainment options. This is entertainment options not just for the kids, but for the whole family. Engage with fun games like 20 questions or iSpy to keep your kids entertained. We prepared a bunch of entertainment options like audiobooks, podcasts, music playlists. We also brought our daughter's tablet, which we downloaded a bunch of shows and movies offline that she could watch during the journey. When we gave her daughter a tablet, we made sure it was during longer stretches of our drive and we always made sure it was educational content. Plan regular breaks every few hours for bathroom breaks and stretches. Look for parks, scenic spots, or rest areas where kids and dogs can burn off much needed energy. It's amazing what a few minutes, just a few minutes of high intensity movement can really do. Snacks and mealtimes. Pack a cooler with healthy snacks and drinks so that you avoid stopping along the way. Stop at scenic spots or parks so that you can have a picnic. I always make sure that I have a variety of snacks and I'm talking like not like just a couple of things. I'm talking like 10 to 20 different options because I find that as a mother with a small child, maybe like 10 minutes with one snack, she wants to move on to the next, to the next, to the next, and you know what? She can because I got options. Sleeping arrangements. Let's be honest. If you have a terrible sleep, you're going to have a terrible drive the next day. Everyone's going to be grumpy. Everyone's going to have body aches. There's going to be more complaining, more arguing, and you probably won't want to be on the road as long that day that you had originally planned. Book accommodations. That's going to be big enough so that everybody in the family is comfortable and again, if you can find a place that has a park or some sort of green space, dog park, a place where the kids and the animals can run around, burn off that energy that they accumulated in the vehicle, you're going to have a great next day. Bring your own bedding or pillow stuffed animal from home that gives your child that comfort of home. We always bring a blanket, a small pillow, and one of our child's, our daughter's stuffed animals with us everywhere we go. Also, try to maintain a consistent bedtime routine so that your child gets enough sleep for the next day. Again, when you do this, less complaining, more easygoing on the next day throughout your journey. Capturing memories. After all, you're planning these road trips to make the best memories and by capturing them, you can reflect back on these days that end up being some of the best times of your life. Encourage your kids to keep travel journals or scrapbooks to document their experiences. You can even get like an empty shoe box or one of those plastic dividers for your child to collect things that they find along the way and you can add a little note that goes along with it so they can look back on these on these items that they've collected and remember a significant moment along the journey. Most of you are probably going to take digital photos with your camera or your phone, but we also brought along a camera that actually printed photos right then and there and those are some of my favorite photos ever. One of my favorite activities to do when I'm traveling anywhere is to actually sit at a like a landmark or beautiful setting and draw it, not just take a picture of it, but sit there and draw it and really like observe what you're looking at, take it in. I encourage you and your whole family to do this activity together. I think it'd be a beautiful bonding experience and a way to really take in a memory. And this brings us to our last point, a very important one, flexibility and patience. Embrace the unexpected and be prepared that things probably won't go the way you expect them to go and just embrace it. Embrace it and love it for how it unfolds. That's part of travel, that's part of road trips. I hope you enjoyed these tips and pieces of advice from two straight years of being on the road and I want to thank Nitza again for being part of this video and providing us with the safety driving tips that we all need to remember before even hitting the road. And if you want to check out some of our other road trip videos, we got a lot of them to help you plan your next road trip. Maybe you haven't decided on where you want to go, we can help you with that. For more tips, advice of traveling with small kids and traveling with a trailer, etc. be sure to check out this playlist and we'll see you in the next video!