5 of our Favorite Things for a Road Trip

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Me and a couple of my favorite bloggers have teamed up to share 5 of our favorite things we take on a road trip. With 7 people in our family the words “road trip” bring cheers from some and moans from others. The moans usually come from the one person that get car sick and the other who thinks it will be boring. Spending hours crammed in a car together can help your family bond and grow closer together or it can have the opposite effect. To make sure our road trips and fun and full of family bonding we make sure to bring along a positive attitude, extra patience and these items to help us arrive at our destination safe, sane and entertained.

Waze App – My husband’s car has a GPS but we find we like to use the Waze app for our navigation. Waze is a community-powered mapping and navigation app that will give you real-time traffic information and road alerts. Waze even helps you navigate to the cheapest gas station on your route. Our state recently had a law passed where we cannot use handheld gadgets like phones while driving. We use this magnetic car mount to keep our phone attached to our dashboard.

Snacks – You can’t take a road trip without having your car fully stocked with snacks. Our favorite snack to bring on road trips are the Stretch Island Fruit Leather. They are flat so they are super easy to pack. They are all natural and each one equals 1/4 cup of fruit. I throw them all in a Ziploc bag and we are good to go. I really like the fact that they are convenient to throw in my crossbody bag if we decide to jump out of the car and do some exploring. Costco sells a big box of 48 for only $10.59. This is an amazing deal, because the individual packages retail for $.79 at Whole Foods. You can occasionally find them online at Amazon for a similar price to Costco. We take these with on nearly every vacation we go on.

Activities – Activities that will keep the kids entertained are a must! We keep a small plastic bin with fun things in the back seat of the car. Here are some of the most popular items that we bring along with us on road trips:

First up, ThinkFun Games these single player games are educational, fun and portable. We own many different versions of these games. I will admit to playing these on long car rides too. One of our faves is Rush Hour and Rush Hour Jr. for the younger kids. We also like to bring along Wikki Stix, if you haven’t seen these before they are basically wax covered yarn that can be bent and twisted into fun shapes. They are slightly stiff and sticky so they hold their shape. They can be reused again and again. We got this small travel pack for around $3 and it has kept our kids entertained for hours. We also like to bring along a Boogie Board because it makes for mess-free drawing and and easy way to play games like tic-tac-toe and more.

Baby Wipes – We no longer have kids in diapers, but baby wipes always come along with us on long car rides. You never know when you will need to clean up messes or sticky hands.

Audiobooks – We have a family full of people who love to read, but reading in the car doesn’t work so well (especially for those prone to car sickness). Bringing along audiobooks is a great way to keep everyone entertained. I check out some of my audiobooks for FREE from our Library using the Overdrive app. The only problem when borrowing audiobooks from the library is you can’t always check them out at the exact time you need them. You may put a book on hold and it won’t come available until after your trip. I have taken advantage of the two free Audiobooks from Audible when I signed up for free 30-day trial. I like the fact that the audiobooks are yours to keep through Audible. One book series my family enjoyed is the Adventure’s Wanted series, the first audiobook Slathbog’s Gold (and several others in the series) are priced super cheap right now, only $4.95. Here are a few other suggestions for great audiobooks for the whole family:

Also, if you roll old school likes us and your car doesn’t have bluetooth, you can get this handy device that will allow you to play music and audiobooks from your phone through your autos speakers. You will need a cassette player, so you have to roll really old school.

Make sure you check out these posts from my friends so you can see the 5 things that they like to take along on their road trips too.

The Coupon Project

Thrifty Northwest Mom

I would love to hear what some of your “must haves” are when it comes to road trips.

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