Thursday, June 28, 2012

travel planning

Self-awareness is key. 
Know your strength and weaknesses.
I am great with organization and planning.  
I am a terrible long distance car traveler.  Terrible.  Particularly when there are children added to the mix.
Thankfully Chris is not a part of the let's-make-good-time club.  He is way more into having a happy wife when we get where we're going.  It has made for great travels together!  I'm really only like to stay in the car for about two hours at a time.  It's not awesome.  I'm pretty sure I'm fun to vacation with, but not so much en route to where we're going.  
I digress.
Since I am looking forward to our actual beach vacation but dreading the car ride, I decided to put together some activities, games, and the like for us as we are on the road.  


Chris and I did some hunting for fun car things that will work for our little family.  So far we raided the Wal-Mart $5 movie bin and got a few new ones to add to our collection.  I bought a couple of cookie sheets (which I also picked up at Wal-Mart for a whopping 92¢ each) to use with our magnetic letters.  Andrea suggested getting puzzles and making them magnets, which i thought was awesome!  I picked up a roll of magnetic tape at Hobby Lobby and only have the one puzzle so far but am planning to pick up a couple more.  This website is where we got the other two ideas.  The ideas are essentially the same for the pipe cleaners and the aluminum foil.  Give them to the kids (separately of course, since we want to make this seem like two totally different activities) so they can make things with them: pipe cleaner creatures and aluminum foil art.
Oh, and I saw this idea for a roadtrip scavenger hunt  that I'm planning to tweak to work for us too!  I especially like the part where you get to stop somewhere and get out of the car when you reach your point goal!
I dig on all of these ideas since they will not make a giant mess in the van.  I'm not planning to tell the kids that I'm bringing anything other than our regular bag of toys that stays in the van.  Otherwise they will plague me with questions about when they get to do the activities!
Here's hoping that my strength in organization and planning will help with my weakness of attitude on a road trip! 
Got any other fun travel games you'd like to share?

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