When we told people our plans for our summer trip, most of our friends thought we were nuts. 10 days and 2200 miles around the Southeast visiting family and friends. Up until then our longest roadtrip was 3 hours over a year ago. Now we we were going to go 600 miles on day 1, 730 miles on the last day, and on days in between anywhere between 180 to 300 miles. Ambitious to say the least. But last Friday with our new roofbox loaded up, kids with bags full of books and travel games, fresh batteries for the headphones for the DVD player, and a few snacks off we went.
We gave the kids a couple of rules as we set off...
1. When 1 person goes to the bathroom everybody goes to the bathroom.
2. Do not ask, are we there yet, we will be as honest as possible about time and distance remaining any time we make a stop
3. If anything you are doing is bugging anyone else in the car you must stop doing it.
4. When you are staying at someone else's house you have to go with the flow when it comes to meals and bedtimes.
We rationed the movies and overall they did very well. My daughters sit in the back row and spent most of the ride reading, but also playing travel bingo and playing with their Barbies. They did get a little punch towards the end of the longest days, but overall were good. Our youngest my 2 year old son was the challenge since it's harder for him to sit in the car seat for that long. For a large part of the first day I was leaning back reading stories to my son and trying to show him the pictures at the same time. Once I got bored of rereading the same books I played ispy with him in the books. He had a couple of crying jags when he was getting tired but couldn't fall asleep, but it really was just a couple of minutes of crying.
So this doesn't become a really long (and potentially boring) I'll break it up into smaller chunks of our different stops including some pictures of what we did along the way.