Four Essential Steps to Take Before a Road Trip
Road trips are a great way of traveling with your family and being able to see some beautiful scenery. They can be fun, life changing and sadly pretty boring at times. Although road trips have changed a lot since the days where the most entertainment we had was a game boy that had non-rechargeable batteries and the screen didn’t light up. Or you had some word cross puzzles that you get burnt out on in just a few hours. We have tablets, laptops and built in DVD players in cars now days which can help time fly by during the more boring legs of your road trip. You still need to plan how to have a great and safe trip and make sure that you can create memories with friends and family members. So here are four ideas for you and your family to try to make the best road trip ever!
1. Entertainment
Compile a list of movies that everyone would like to watch during the road trip. Let the kids pick out the movies they want to watch so they can be entertained. The good thing is that there are so many Redbox across the country you can always change out the movie you want to watch. Bring some games so you can spend some time with your kids and have fun, these can be included on tablets, or even old school games like 5-Star or the license plate game.
2. Music
This is probably what causes the most fights in the car during road trips. Dad likes classic rock like Led Zepplein, The Mom enjoys country and rockabilly kind of music while the teenagers love One direction and Justin Bieber. There are great apps now like spotify and pandora that can change the music enough where everyone can here what they want. If this still does not happen then headphones are a really cheap option at walmart and everyone has a ipod or something that plays music.
3. Books
This can be great for your kids to become more productive then playing angry birds for hours on end. This is also a great option if you are traveling during the school year and your kids can catch up or even get ahead on their homework.
4. Safety
This is probably the most important one of them all. Be safe and get your car checked out before you travel long distances. Make sure that every one is always wearing their seat belts. Also if you are living in a more rural area and are traveling to a large city like New York or Chicago it wouldnt be a bad idea to look into some texas defensive driving to get you prepared for any kind of traffic that you might be seeing
Have fun on your road trip and take lots of pictures so you can always remember the things that you did. Be patient with younger children and don’t get annoyed when they ask if were there yet 100 times in 10 minutes. Most of all be safe and travel smart.
