We're Going on a Road Trip - Part One

Back in January, we started reading the Little House on the Prairie books to the girls at bedtime.  They fell in love with the stories and were especially captivated when Brian brought them home the original television series with Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert.  In April, Brian discovered that you could actually visit the homestead of the Ingalls family in De Smet, South Dakota and camp overnight in covered wagons.  On a whim, we decided it would be a fun trip to take the girls out to see some of the places where the stories actually took place.  So, after a bit of research, we designed what we lovingly refer to as our "Epic Road Trip."  In just a few days, we will be heading off to explore American history on a family road trip.

Thanks to Google, we have discovered that we will be driving for 53 hours over the course of 11 days.  Add in 1,734 additional hours for bathroom breaks and pretend bathroom breaks and that is a lot of hours on the road with four children.  I decided I would have to do some serious planning to keep the girls entertained in the car and ensure that Brian and I arrived at our destination with our sanity.  Thanks to Pinterest and my own creative genius, I have devised a pretty solid plan for keeping the girls entertained during the car ride.  I'll share some general ideas in this post and the specific daily drive plans in the next post.

Each girl will get her very own travel binder for the trip. Inside each binder I put a zipper pouch with markers, dry erase markers, a small eraser, and a pen.  I also recycled some drink mix containers to hold crayons for the girls. Each binder will come with a cover page with a map of the United States (printable from Pinterest - all these links are on my board), a map of the United States with the states labeled, and a print out of the License Plate Game, and some blank paper for coloring, doodling, or whatever.

 

Each girl will also be getting a cookie sheet that I have decorated with their name.  I only decorated them, so they can't argue over which one is theirs when the inevitably get mixed up in the car.  I got this idea from Pinterest - apparently there are hundreds of things that the girls can do with cookie sheets in the car.  My main objective is something for them to press on and a place to keep whatever I am giving them to entertain themselves from rolling onto the car floor.

I decided early on that we wouldn't be stopping for lunch or dinner while we were on the road.  I plan to use stops as an opportunity for the kids to run around and burn off some energy.  I'm pretty sure that after hours in the car the last thing they would want to do is sit quietly in a restaurant.  So, we are packing road trip food and I have designed these little cards as a way to prompt them to get moving at rest stops.  I'm calling these the Rest Stop Rodeo cards - no real reason for the rodeo, I just like the way it sounds.  I saw a post on Pinterest where someone did something like a scavenger hunt as a literacy exercise, but thought this might be a little easier for our girls.  So, at each stop, they will draw a card and the person who draws the card will be the leader and instruct the others on what to do.  There are five easy tasks for each stop.

 I am not ashamed to admit that I plan to use bribery on this trip to keep the girls in check.  I found a printable for Car Bucks on Pinterest, but I prefer to call it Car Cash -I'm all about alliteration.  The girls can earn bucks for good behavior (nap time=Car Cash) and trade them in for 30 minutes on the iPad or exchange them for real dollars to buy souvenirs.  I'm really hoping that this helps to monitor iPad usage and keep them from fighting over it. This could be wishful thinking.  I even debated leaving the iPad at home, but it is such a good distraction, I'm going to try this method and see how it works.

 For each day that we are driving, I have a little ziploc bag with popsicles sticks that the girls will get to pull from for Road Trip Rewards.  For each travel day, I have one reward for each hour that we are on the road.  I'm not sure if we will pull these on the hour or just as needed.  For more on the rewards, see Post #2.

 For each day of our trip, I have created Travel Logs for the girls.  Emma and Charlotte have logs with a few places for them to write about the trip. Cristina and Ella have places to draw pictures.  As time allows, I'll try to ask them about their favorite part of the day and write down their responses.

So, this is my general plan to maintain sanity.  I'll let you know in a few weeks if it worked!