Hi friends,
I’m writing this ahead of time, because by the time Friday rolls around, I’ll be in our minivan watching countryside swishing by out my window. We’re driving out west to visit family for a couple of weeks and then leaving our daughter at college when we drive back home.
For those of you who haven’t made a cross-country drive across the center of the United States, it really gives you a feel for how vast the countryside is: hundreds of miles of farmland or just empty grazing land. We do love seeing the towering windmills that have been cropping up along our drive over the last few years.
How exactly do I survive two long days of driving with a car full of kids, plus a quick update on my writing. 🙂
Thank goodness for electronic devices! They revolutionized long distant travel with young children and gave us adults even more stories to bore the kids with that start out with, “Back when I was a kid . . . “
I bet some of you can empathize with my memories of enduring long car rides as a kid in the ’70s and ’80s.
- The alphabet game – first one who finds the letters from A to Z wins . . . and everyone always got stuck on Q!
- License plate bingo: filling in different states we saw to get bingo.
- Teasing siblings until they got yelled at by parents.
- Asking parents how much longer until we get there.
- Eating tons of snacks.
- Drawing and coloring books
- Reading until you got carsick
And now, the kids can watch movies together, play games on phones, binge watch TV series, and listen to tons of audiobooks. All much more entertaining than my childhood memories.
However, falling asleep in the car hasn’t changed much and everyone still wakes up with sore necks and backs from the awkward positions.
We still try to take time to turn devices off and play road games together, run a quick game of tag at rest stops or listen to audiobooks as a family. But with two full thirteen hour days of driving to get out West, binge watching a few movies is a great way to ease the boredom.
A few non-electronic ideas that are still fun:
- A clipboard with blank paper, a new pack of colored pencils (NO crayons. They melt in hot cars) and some of the following print outs:
- Custom coloring pages found with a google search and printed, like mermaids, dinosaurs, disney, or even adult coloring pages.
- Custom mazes
- Sudoku, coloring, crossword and word search books from the dollar store.
- A pack of origami paper with a how-to book of patterns.
- yarn and crochet or knitting needles with a new pattern to try.
- friendship bracelet kits
- magnet toy sets
- A bag of special treats that are given out when you get back in the car after a rest stop.
- A map of the drive so kids can follow along.
Hopefully some of these are helpful to any of you out there who are taking long trips this summer. What about you? Any fun ideas for long car rides?
As for writing, I spent a bit of time going over edits by some of my latest beta readers. Shoutout of thanks to Olivia and Jeremiah!
And we’ll see if I can squeeze in a bit of writing time during vacation or not.
The plan is to get going again full speed once September rolls around.
Have a great summer out there! All the best and thanks so much for your support!
— Misty 🙂
Recent Comments