ROADTRIP WITH KIDS
I haven’t grown up travelling, the only few travels in two decades we had ever done were to visit our grandparents in our hometown down south, which was very strategically planned & discussed over as a family. Completely contrary to the environment I had been growing up in my husband’s family, they travelled for leisure, they travelled for religious purposes, they travelled for fun and mostly it was abrupt and spontaneous with no planning whatsoever sort. So, to imagine what would happen if the two such people with extreme backgrounds met would be a story I’d keep for some other time.
Over a decade of being with each other and influencing each other, we have become storytellers of a rare kind. We travel like a bunch of nomads, building our experiences and building our stories based on things we experience firsthand. Mostly, it’s planned and organised, but there have also been sudden, abrupt, impromptu plans that have come into existence.
But of course, things change when you have kids. The overpacking, the “are we there yet” rant, the food stop-overs, the washroom breaks, everything becomes maddening X 10 when travelling with kids. So, did any of such experience ever stop us. Ha ! It’s rather given us more zeal and excitement. We have travelled with a 5-week-old baby and a 3-year-old sibling vomiting her gut throughout the way due to food poisoning from the previous night. Over the years, we’ve had some extremely memorable and lovely road trips and some horrible regretful trips too, but over the years we’ve certainly learned, maundered and have gotten creative in ways to travel with kids.
Though we don’t have non-potty trained, nursing kids travelling with us anymore, we have quite an experience of doing all that when our girls were younger, we have progressed to have fully trained young kids who now struggle with motion sickness. Long car rides can be hard on kids, who quickly get bored when the destination seems far which could tempt you to hand over the screens to your kids, which again isn’t a great solution for both you and your child in the long run. Well, at our end since motion sickness is quite an issue, giving a screen is also not a solution I could run to at all. So, of all the trips we’ve made here are some tips I could think of and never ditch them no matter how planned or instant our travel plan was made of.
- Pack it extra: If you are riding in your car and you have the extra space, then do not restrain yourself from packing those extra things. For a 2-day trip, pack clothes for a 4-day trip. It’s ok to come back with clean clothes, but easy and hard to run out of clothes and I mean here not just for kids but for you as parents too. You never know when you’d get puked on or when they would drop some food on their clothes. Packing extra clothes is always my first go-to.
- Meds: Pack all the important medicines you could need. Though finding a chemist /drug store shouldn’t be a big deal, I would never risk wanting to look out for or being dependent on a nearby store for medicines. So basic medicines for fever, cold, vomiting, loose motions, just basic over-the-counter medicines that you are familiar with or the ones you or your child are accustomed to, along with some basic first-aid in certainly mandatory for me.
- Be prepared- to face anything. All the Instagram ideal shots of you sipping your coffee and gazing into the mountains can have a dose of reality with a crying toddler all smothered in its poop, demands of you that instant. And your other young child just crying for not finding their favourite sock adds to the family drama. Things can and will surely get crazy at some point or the other. But when you are prepared to face anything and everything, such moments seem frail and little, or you would have the mindset to face it. A lot of resilience comes from how to embrace yourself.
- Expect low– When your expectations are limited to basic, you’ll find happiness even when you meet your expectations, a little higher than what you anticipated. There have been tons of times when we’ve booked our hotel Airbnb and the pictures have been completely different to what we were living at and that, as a whole has been a spoiler for our trip. When travelling, not being able to find great pit stops for food, or hotels can be a bummer but it’s a reality. So, expecting low has worked wonders for us. In some way, it’s a good coping mechanism.
- Food – I can’t believe this point comes at #5. We have one fussy eater at home. So it can get complicated trying to look for food stops that would suit her taste buds. So, I would always pack extra food, lots of fruits, cereals, snacks, peanut butter, jam, bread, healthy snacks, granola bars, sour candies, oats cookies etc, just the things they would munch at home to carry along.
- Favourite toys & books/ podcasts – I would make sure to pack their favourite toys which I would take out in parts, so one day one set of toys and the other day it would be another set. Also a set of their favourite read-alouds and books to read through over the trip. Listening to podcasts is fun, for them to be quiet and for us to strike up a conversation, and chat over topics that could build and understand their storytelling creative sides.
- Activity books/Journals– I’d always invest in activity books since travelling is such an important part of our lives. Usborne Publishers has tons of books and things for children of different age groups that could keep them busy for hours over the trip. For long trips that involve many days, I would make sure to create a journal that would involve the itinerary and the fun activities, colouring pages they could work on over time. It’s quite memorable to see back how they perceive and see the things that often get overlooked by us.
Another thing they loved was getting the reusable stickers, they spent long hours sticking and unsticking dinosaurs and other things over the windows and seats and kept them engaged for a long time. - Plan kids-friendly stop-over- When planning for long trips, plan and study the place you’d be visiting too, what areas would you cover and what would be a place your kids would like to visit and see. Just an exquisite camel ride or a simple swing, a stopover for an ice cream treat can excite them loads. Sometimes be spontaneous, when you see a fun place stop by and let them walk through, it could be a fun exploration.
- Pack gifts – We’d done a long trip travelling from Delhi to Kanyakumari and back home, we travelled for 26 days, and every day was a long stretch from one place to the other, after first few days of excitement when it sitting in the car became routine and boring for them, something that kept up the excitement was the gift. Having simple stuff packed and given to them gave so much excitement to them. Just simple play dough packs and crayons gave them so much unexplainable happiness. It was one aspect of the day that kept them going. Certainly a hack I will implement for every long trip.
- Finally, keep their comfort as a priority. One awesome thing about India is not having the car seat rule as a mandatory rule. I mean I know there would be a lot of minds that wouldn’t agree with me here, and it’s ok because for us it has worked out great. We have had the luxury of spreading out the bed setting behind, so they can play, eat, lounge and sleep whenever they want. We had them sleep in for long hours and up straight cuddling each other and as a result had non-fussy kids.