printables

Road Trip Boredom Busters

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My kids love to travel. They are great in the car but they always tell me that their favorite part of going on a roadtrip is seeing what I’ve found to keep them busy.

First some tips for a road trip no matter what age:

  • Do not give them everything you brought at once or at the beginning of the trip. Let the excitement of going somewhere fun wear off first.
  • Wait to give them new things until you have to
  • Try to anticipate a problem before it happens (frustration, boredom etc)
  • Engage your kids. It’s easy to zone out on the road but try to play games with them take turns playing with each kid sperately etc.
  • Plan for the worst. Have barf bags, extra paper towels etc on hand in case someone gets sick. The worst thing is to be scrambling for something for someone to get sick in
  • Don’t set your expectations too high. Don’t expect them to play on their iPod or Nintendo DS happily the whole time. The people next to us on the plane to Hawaii only brought their 4 year old a video game and 1 year old 1 toy. My kids actually ended up entertaining theirs because the mom was about to rip her hair out.
  • Have fun! Bring silly accessories, make up songs and stories, have a talk with an accent hour anything to make the trip more fun because all you can do when you’re stuck in the car and everyone is going crazy is laugh.

Here is what I packed my 8 and 10 year old for our most recent trip (besides the iPad/iPods with movies)

New coloring books (although those are more for me than them), sticker book, magazines, little toys (that weird looking guy is a puppet) pens, crayons, gum and a pack of activities/games that I printed out. Here’s what I included in that pack

*Tip – use the fast draft or fast draft black and white to cut down on ink for projects like these when the quality doesn’t need to be 100%

All of these can be used as is with pencils/markers/crayons OR  you can put them in sheet protectors and use with dry erase markers!

I made up this Hangman printable at their request and thought I’d share it here

Download it here

We had some good tips on flying travel on our Facebook page yesterday if you want to add your own! Love that we can all get ideas from each other!

For more tips on Roadtrip Roundup and Travel

I also recently wrote some tips on an article for Care.com

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Allison Waken is a wife, mom of boys and Phoenix, AZ native. She has been creating inspiring content for All for the Boys since 2011. Allison loves travel, movies and spending as much time as possible with her family while she can!

2 Comments

  1. Great ideas. We have a 12 hour road trip ahead of us and I am starting to collect fun activities for the boys. We like to save our movies for the desperate moments. One year we did a scavenger hunt where we checked things off the list that we saw in our travels, ie. cows, red tractor, s

  2. Traveling through car is definitely something very entertaining. Car transit is very luxurious and a long drive with family or friends in new beautiful car is really very special. For a memorable and nice trip, the car should be alright with its engine performing well enough for the journey. So, its better to repair the car engine before any long tour.

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