Our Favorite Thing to Do as a Family on Road Trips

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Our favorite thing to do as a family on road trips might surprise you. And road trip is misleading, we do this ALL the time in the car. So what is it?

Googling!

Yes, our favorite thing to do on road trips is to google. We started this when the boys were younger and full of curiosity and now everyone participates. When we see something on the side of the road or the map that is odd, or peaks our curiosity we ask – “Hey why ARE there palm trees in a circle in the middle of nowhere on I-10?”

When the answer is “I don’t know” we go straight to Google! This is an active way for me to help my kids not be ok with “I don’t know” too. I want them to keep that young curiosity. I want them to learn to look things up on their own instead of waiting for the easy answer.

It also is usually very interesting and usually entertaining. I can’t tell you how many things we’ve learned on the road by Googling. I absolutely LOVE having a world of information at my fingertips – why not use it?!

It’s even sparked some impromptu trips or changes to a trip. Like when we decided to visit the Salton Sea. We always see signs so decided to look it up which lead to a whole little lesson and then a visit where we learned that it has an interesting smell too 😉

Some things we’ve learned along the way:

• Why there’s a “tree ring circus” off the I-10
• Why Bloody Basin is called “Bloody Basin”
• Where the Salton Sea came from
• What are the “slabs” or Slab City
• The history of the abandoned race track outside of Phoenix

And that’s just a few from our regular trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles. We look up everything from restaurants to unique buildings and national parks. A lot of times it leads to searching beyond what we initially started looking at too.

This was so much fun to do on our RV trip last year. We learned a ton about the areas, cities and landmarks we visited.

If you don’t have or want to use up data while you’re traveling you could start a big book of questions and write down everything you wonder on your way and then google them when you get somewhere with wifi. It’s also a great way to show your kids how to search for information and not trust one source (like Wikipedia) exclusively.

Do you do this on road trips? What’s your favorite thing to do?