Family Travel Tips

Our list of tips and tricks for car travel with kids (in my case, in the 7 to 18 yr range).

Contents 1 Navigation 2 Car Travel 3 Travel Breaks 4 Media and Entertainment 5 Hotels

Navigation

• If you don't have a GPS navigation system, get one! Hugely useful for finding things (esp. restaurants, grocery, pharmacy, parks) on the fly.

• For weekend and summer travel, elementary schools usually have playgrounds, which can be excellent "get out and run around" stops to break up long car trips. No bathrooms, though.

• Ahead of time, use Google map search to research restaurants (read the reviews) around your destinations.

Car Travel

• The person that invented the in-car DVD player is a genius.

• For long trips, Windex the windows inside and out before you leave. It's amazing how much "cleaner" the car will feel.

• Some high-end bus lines (e.g. the Boston/NYC Limo Liner) have on-board wireless access points. If you roll alongside for a while, your passengers can get on-line.

• Some data phones can provide shared Wifi net access over EVDO. Teenagers think IM'ing on their laptop while going down the road is very cool.

• An inexpensive power inverter and outlet strip let you plug in all of your wall chargers (e.g. Gameboy, laptop, etc.) without having to get expensive dedicated car versions.

• We tend to limit DVD and electronics usage and such to longer travel segments (e.g. more than 1.5 to 2 hours). Otherwise, everyone's "lost" in their own world.

Travel Breaks

• At each stop, everyone HAS to try to use the bathroom.

• Pullups/depends are useful for small kids for a few years after they're out of diapers if they really really have to go, but you can't pull over. With five people, "bladder phase management" always seems to be a challenge in our family.

• At every stop, throw away all accumulated trash in the car. Designate someone to be "trash man".

• If you have room, folding camp chairs are great for the adults to sit while the kids play.

Media and Entertainment

• If you have a video-capable iPod, get the A/V cable. Most hotel TVs and DVD-equipped cars have an A/V input.

• Use Handbrake to rip DVDs to the iPod. Many of our physical DVDs end up getting scratched or lost, but they last forever on the iPod.

• Before your trip, visit your friends with kids to borrow/swap DVDs. Everyone with kids has a DVD library, 80% of which nobody watches any more.

• Bring all your Netflix movies with return envelopes, and mail them back during vacation. New movies will be waiting (usually) when you get home.

• Hulu is a great source of kid-friendly content, but it's streaming-only and many hotel Internet connections don't have enough bandwidth in the evenings.

• Apple movie rentals are usually cheaper than hotel on-demand movies, and can be transferred to your iPod (see above).

• Get an Airport Express to provide private Wifi in your room. It's compact, and saves you from dealing with hotels with poor Wifi coverage. Also, in some configurations, it will let you share a per-day connection, without having to pay for each laptop, iPod Touch, Nintendo DS, and iPhone device.

Hotels

• Many "extended stay"/suite hotels have multi-bedroom suites that are great for families. Many (e.g. Residence Inn) have decent hot breakfast buffets, and some have "manager reception" buffet dinners. The food gets old after a night or two, but it's convenient and included with your room rate.

• Useful room food in case someone gets hungry when everything's closed: microwave popcorn, Raman noodles, instant oatmeal and a box of junk/special cereal. The cereal's also useful at the breakfast buffet to augment the usual selections.

• Most hotels will give you a later checkout time (e.g. 12:30 or 1pm) if you ask for it.

• If you care about a pool (key for us), at reservation time, ask about pool hours and if there are any maintenance issues that will affect pool availability ("under repair" seems to happen quite a bit).