Tuesday
Jul012008
Top 10 - Family Vacation Travel Tips - Road Trip
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 06:52PM Top 10 - Family Vacation Travel Tips - Road Trip!
by Sherri Caldwell - The Rebel Housewife®http://www.rebelhousewife.com
- Advance Planning & Reservations: When it comes time to make the plan, I spend a full day or two on the computer, tracking down great travel deals on hotels and theme park tickets. The best sources of information I have found were www.TripAdvisor.com for general information and reviews; www.hotels.com for more specific hotel info; and www.hotwire.com, if you can handle the risk, excitement & adventure of booking on price, general location and star-rating, without knowing where you will end up -- you're also locked in to the deal once you commit to the game: no refunds, no cancellations. We ended up with the perfect hotel at a great price in the exact location we needed (across the street from SeaWorld in Orlando), so it worked out really well.
I also always check the AAA website and rates for accommodations, attractions and road trip planning -- the membership always pays for itself every year in vacation savings alone.
Another great source of comprehensive info & resources for beach vacations:
Best Family Beach Vacations: Ultimate Beach Vacation Travel Guide
Final note: Always check the direct website of the hotel or theme park you are heading toward, as sometimes the best rates and discounts are to be found right there, as was the case with SeaWorld/Aquatica and Holiday Inn/Cocoa Beach.
- Feeding the Family: Stay at hotels that offer Kids Eat Free! programs, like Holiday Inn. Even when Kids Eat Free, arrange for a room with a mini-fridge and microwave so you can keep drinks and snacks and cover a meal or two a day with simple meals/backpack picnics. I try to emphasize a late-afternoon LUNCH as the big meal of the day on vacation. It's easy to scramble up a good breakfast, even if it is fruit & cereal, and snacks throughout the day. If we eat lunch after the main feeding frenzy between 12 - 2pm, we can get a good meal at lunch prices, take a break during the heat of the day, and go all night on snacks and/or a light dinner. When we wait to eat a late dinner, it's always a disaster: by then, everyone is usually too tired and hungry to agree on anything, much less settle down for a pleasant meal. Lunch is definitely the best meal of the day.
- Getting There: If you are driving, be sure to take along your
Cooler/Backpack Picnic Essentials for the car and throughout your vacation.
- 1-2-3 MAGIC IN THE CAR: I learned this amazing technique from Dr. Thomas Phelan, listening to his parenting series, 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12
. We used it all the way to Florida last year with three kids, ages 7, 10 and 12, and it was amazing. Basically, you pay the kids to be good, by explaining the game to them up-front:
"For every 15-minute segment of our trip that you guys can get along and behave, with no one fighting, whining, bickering, teasing, hitting, touching, looking at, being mean or provoking anyone else (including Mom or Dad), you will each earn 50 cents -- $2 per hour for each of you, which can end up being as much as $20 to spend on souvenirs and stuff while we're on vacation. That is the only money you will have from us to spend on the arcades and all that stuff you always want us to buy. The thing is, with earning this money, you all get the bonus, or no one gets it, and every 15 minutes is a new segment."
It might sound more complicated than it needs to be -- I just kept track of the 15 minute segments on a notepad and X'ed one out as necessary (that was early in the trip, and then they quickly realized this was a serious money-making or money-losing game). While they were being good, I didn't even have to pay attention to it -- after two good hours, I'd look down and happily announce, "You guys just made $4 each -- nice job!"
It turned out, they didn't miss more than one or two segments the whole drive down, and it was the best $60 we ever spent, so quiet and pleasant. We would easily have spent more than $60 on all the stuff, over 5 days in the hotels, arcades and theme parks.
Tip Within Tip: That $60 usually works out to be what I've collected in our Vacation Jar over the course of the year, depositing loose change, quarters, dimes and nickels I clean out of my bag or pockets or come across in the laundry or around the house. (It doesn't have to be 50 cents for 15 minutes -- it can be whatever works out for your family and budget. The cool thing is, it really works!!)
- Car Games/Activities: It used to be, when my kids were much younger, I would fill up the car with coloring books and thousand-piece art sets and travel-sized, magnetic or plastic games and creative little kits just for road trips! About five miles down the road, we would have 3,000 broken crayons, open markers, window clings (consistency of boogers, when they are all ripped apart and rolled up into little, tiny balls), stickers, misc bits of plastic and trashy little pieces of paper EVERYWHERE.
All hail the age of technology: the DVD player, GameBoys/Nintendo and the iPod. With older kids, we let them each bring a smallish backpack with their own essentials (with extra batteries and/or power chargers).
I still can't resist putting together Mom's Bag of Tricks, but I keep it much simpler:
-- One book we can read aloud for family reading (this year: The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 3)by Rick Riordan);
-- A deck of cards and our favorite card book;
-- One set of dry erase markers, the kind with their own, individual eraser cap;
-- Printable games we can play together: Road Trip Bingo (Auto & Roadside editions), License Plate Game and Road Trip Scavenger Hunt; all printed out for each passenger and put into clear plastic sheet protectors, so they can use the dry erase markers to play the games, over and over and over...
The BEST SOURCE for car travel games and printables, and a whole bunch of other really great info and resources is: www.MomsMinivan.com.
Phenomenal, fabulous website, so go check it out!
Printables and travel games also available at:
www.best-family-beach-vacations.com
- About Souvenirs: It can be a really smart thing to plan ahead a little bit, and/or visit the local Wal-Mart in the vicinity of wherever you are going and let the kids shop, while you are picking up milk for the hotel fridge or other essentials. The reason being, the local Wal-Mart will have all kinds of local-themed souvenirs and stuff, even for Disneyworld and other theme parks and attractions, and it is SO MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE! The kids' dollars (and yours) will go much farther if you wear your Wal-Mart Mickey Mouse t-shirt into the park, and you don't have to buy the keychains, the big pencils, the snow globes, jewelry or any of that other stuff in the park and carry it around all day. Just a thought--
- And Other Stuff to Buy: While you are at Wal-Mart or Target or wherever, before or after you are actually on the trip, pick up GLOW STICKS, or whirly-battery-operated neon thing-a-ma-jigs. Anything that glows is a good thing, and I'll tell you why: After dark at the parks, the vendors come out, with every blinky, glowy, whirry little piece of crap you could ever hope to find, and it costs THREE TIMES AS MUCH as if you buy it at your local discount store (or order in bulk from Oriental Trading) and bring it out when the screaming-spending-frenzies hit. We favor the neon glow stick bracelets you can buy for less than $5 a dozen -- not only does it satisfy the need for something, ANYTHING, that GLOWS IN THE DARK...it makes it easier to keep track of your own family members after dark...
- The Family that Dresses Alike Wins: It might be geeky or silly, but after a dozen years at this, I know the unarguable common sense of MATCHING T-SHIRTS, at least all the same color. It makes everyone easy to spot, recognize and keep track of members of your own herd.
It is also invaluable, should you become separated, in explaining to a helpful park employee or security team member: "Well, he's 7 years old, blonde hair, and he's wearing a shirt just like this one."
Our all-time favorite family t-shirt, we discovered last year: SpongeBob SquarePants, in bright yellow (with glow-in-the-dark eyes!). We got a lot of attention, with cries of "Hey, it's SpongeBobs!" Highly, highly effective. Neon green, neon orange and RED also work well (except in the case of RED on 4th of July, which really kind of defeats the whole point, as everybody else wears red, white and/or blue, so go with SpongeBob on 4th of July and wear red the next day).
- ??? - a gas-saving tip, perhaps? -
- ??? - hmmm.... -
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You will notice, in our Top 10 - Family Vacation Travel Tips - Road Trip!, we've only got eight (8) tips to this point. That's not just because it's late, and I'm tired and I've got to get started on the whole laundry-organizing-packing mess -- I am leaving it at eight (8), for now, because I want to hear from YOU:
What are your most-favorite, tried & true, best Family Vacation Travel Tips - Road Trip!? Please share in Comments below or email to: sherri@rebelhousewife.com.
Please note: I am working on the next bestselling Rebel Housewife book, which will be blog-to-book about CAMP MOMMY. It is very possible that comments and published responses on RebelHousewife.com will be included in the book. Please be aware of this disclaimer and implied release when you comment or respond on RebelHousewife.com. Where possible, we are happy to include your name (first name, last initial), city and link or business reference, as appropriate, so please include as much information as you would like to be attributed or "anonymously," if you prefer. Thanks!
Reader Comments (2)
Your blog is lovely! Thanks for sharing this suggestive tips.