Road Trip Lessons
Take your kids on a long drive (and take away their phones)
I grew up in a road trip family. We drove everywhere. Around Wisconsin and the rest of the Midwest, to Kentucky to see my aunt every Thanksgiving, to Virginia to see my grandma, Maryland for the beach, and to national parks all over the country. Five hours, 10 hours, 20 hours….it didn’t matter. There was no chance we would fly. It wasn’t even a consideration.
I’m not exactly sure why. I’m guessing price, though at some point the gas and nights in hotels along the way had to add up to the price of a short flight. It must have had more to do with my parents’ personalities. They still drive everywhere. They just drove from Wisconsin to Big Bend (22 hours) even though that is not a pretty drive. They’re very boomer in the way that the thing they know is easier than the new thing, even though the thing they know is significantly more time consuming, dangerous, and objectively harder than the new thing. But I guess it’s fine, because some of our best memories are on road trips. My parents really, really like driving.
And so my brothers and I had to like it, too. And we did, for the most part. (There was a multi-year period when one of my brothers got carsick regularly, and was probably miserable, but…he just had to deal? Looking back I feel bad for him. Once, he threw up in a frisbee becuase there was nothing else available, and I tried to document it for a high school video class, which caused my father to try to reach into the backseat and knock the video camera—large, this was 2004—out of my hand while driving and veer into the other lane. Good times.)
But mostly, we liked the road trips, or at least I did. We had a series of vans. A Ford Aerostar, a Ford Windstar, a Honda Odyssey. My parents would sit up front, I would sit in a bucket seat in the middle, and one or both brothers would sit in the way back, depending on their age at the time. Eventually, it was just the youngest in the back, which he promised me recently was fun and not lonely.
We would play the classic road trip games. Finding a license plate from every state, finding a sign starting with every word of the alphabet, I Spy, etc. But mostly, especially in later years, I would read and listen to my Discman, and eventually iPod. My youngest brother told me one of his core road trip memories is listening to a Muppets cassette.
We would leave early, always. On the road at sunrise. We’d start off with NPR’s Morning Edition, which I liked even as a kid. Around Chicago (it seems no matter where you’re headed, this is the initial route from Wisconsin) my dad would switch to a music station and I would tune out.
Our road trips were dad-dominated. He drove, he had final say on the music, he decided when we would stop. We did not stop often. If there was a bathroom break, you’d better take advantage. We never stopped at roadside attractions that are typically associated with road trips (the largest wheel of cheese, or whatever.) Rarely, we stopped at lookout points. Only if it was really pretty, and more often as we got older and could get in and out of the car quickly. My dad isn’t a very patient person. I understand, because I’m not either. Unloading three kids for a five-minute stop sounds like a huge hassle. It takes me five minutes just to get Stella back in her carseat if she’s being squirmy. Just a few days ago, we drove past a gorgeous field of tulips in the Netherlands. I took a photo out the window of the car because stopping sounded like such a pain.
My mom read magazines and books and packed tuna sandwiches and trail mix and lots of other healthy-ish snacks. We would stop for McDonald’s maybe once a road trip. This was a huge treat, and one reason I looked forward to road trips.
For a few summers, my mom read the Harry Potter books out loud. This was books 1-4, before we waited in line at the bookstore on release day and tore through them on our own.
I read a lot to myself in the car, too. But I also spent hours staring out the window thinking about nothing, eventually contemplating something in my life at the time. Boredom is important. When I asked my youngest brother whether he learned anything from road trips, he said he learned to be ok with time passing, with not being able to really do anything and to be ok with that.
It’s not like there wasn’t entertainment. We would get in big family discussions. At least once a road trip it would become heated. This is where my family excels. We love to debate. This entire era was before iPhones. You didn’t have to participate in the debate, but you couldn’t really tune out. There was nothing else to do, after all. And no one else to talk to. We weren’t texting our friends or on social media. During conversations, we couldn’t immediately look up answers or prove each other wrong. It was more interesting, and more rewarding if later we found out the answer to something we had been discussing. We were stuck with each other, so even if a fight turned ugly, it had to be resolved fairly quickly. No one wants tension hovering in a packed car.
(The one exception to the peace of no phones is Google maps. No cell phones meant my mom would track our route on a giant road atlas. Nice. Except if my dad had a question about which exit to take on short notice, and it wasn’t clear, and suddenly we were missing the exit and driving miles out of the way, or veering off at the last second. Or having to stop to ask a gas station attendant for directions. Or stuck in traffic with no knowledge of an alternate route. I love Google maps.)
We had our own music, but still spent a lot of time listening to the radio and to my dad tell us why whatever song from the 70s was superior to anything today. This is road trip 101. You have to listen to music you wouldn’t otherwise like. As we got older, he was subjected to our music as well. My dad and I took a road trip to California when I was 14. We traded CDs. He would play The Beatles, I would play Avril Lavigne, etc. (I admit that at the time, he had better taste.) My middle brother started making playlists for family road trips once I went to college, and I’m told they were fairly well received.
A key part of road trips is stopping for the night. For us, that was typically something like a Holiday Inn. Somewhere inexpensive, often with a pool, and for sure with continental breakfast. We loved an indoor pool as kids. And we loved having cable TV, something we did not have at home. This was the rare chance to watch Rugrats or some other show we didn’t normally have access to. We would order pizza to the room and, like McDonald’s, this was a treat. Especially if it was Papa John’s and we got garlic butter sauce. I was and still am a huge fan of a hotel chain continental breakfast. Those little oatmeal packets and a bad muffin? Sign me up! Then we were back on the road, early.
(Often, the stopping is the trip. A large portion of our family trips were camping trips. Camping and road trips are intertwined in my mind, but lessons learned camping is a whole different post.)
Sometimes, we didn’t stop. We would drive from Wisconsin to Virginia in one go, driving into the dark. I liked driving at night. Or, being a passsenger at night. But, type A, high anxiety oldest daughter that I am, I would also worry. I would stare ahead into the rearview mirror, watching my dad vigilantly to make sure he didn’t look tired or fall asleep. This was never actually a concern, but for some reason I always felt a need to make sure he was alert, especially if my mom was sleeping. I don’t know what I would have done if I thought he looked tired. I can’t imagine actually telling him to pull over. But keeping an eye on the situation made me feel like we would all make it to our destination safely. We always did. We were so lucky. Decades of road trips and not one accident.
And we saw so much of the country! A huge part of my love for the U.S., despite everything, is its geography and regional diversity. We took it in at 65 mph, coast to coast, north to south, through cities and small towns and traffic and empty back roads, through prairies and corn fields and deserts, over mountains and along coasts, thanks to feats of engineering like Going to the Sun Road and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It’s a beautiful, enormous place.
There are safer ways to travel. And much faster ways, too. But it’s about the drive. My parents like to say they’re good at road trips, but as I got older and took road trips with friends in college and my now husband around Europe, where we stopped often and saw all the sights and pulled over for full lunches in restaurants and drove only a few hours a day, I realized what my parents are actually good at is settling into the car for long distances. (It’s telling that when my brothers and I took a road trip without them, to Texas, we also barely stopped.)
We’re all grown up now and haven’t taken a road trip in more than a decade. I was 26 on the last one, I think. My brothers around 20 and 17. My parents no longer had a minivan, so we all sat in the backseat of their Subaru Impreza. We had lots of discussions, and a couple of fights. The music choices were more democratic. We did have cell phones, and had to make my dad pull over in areas with good service so I could send a freelance article and my brother could call into an internship meeting. We actually stopped for local specialties, like BBQ in Kansas and lobster rolls in Maine. It was one of our best family trips, built on a foundation of driving together, being stuck together in a confined space, for hours and hours and hours of our lives.
Living in Europe, we rarely drive. We take the train or budget airline flights. My daughter’s life is so different than mine was. She’s been on something like 70 flights at 20 months. She’s obsessed with the bus. But I’ve been thinking about how big a part of my life road trips were, and how to give her something similar. A time to be bored, stuck with your family for hours. I’ve also been thinking about how little it took to give us excitement as kids. A hotel pool. A Happy Meal.
That’s not to say I’m going to start driving everywhere. I love the train and Ryanair and I are in a long-term, love-hate relationship. But it’s something on my mind.
What are your favorite road trip memories? Are you planning any family road trips this summer?
– Rebecca 💛
P.S. If you’re looking for adult road trip inspiration, like this drive around Martinique, follow Be a Better Traveler.
P.P.S. Some baby travel essentials.
This sounds like my childhood summers! You did such a great job capturing it all, it had me thinking “ohhhh yeah, I remember that feeling”!
“We saw so much of the country!” Dad & I stop all the time now at road signs & local food—less people to feed & more time.
(Obviously) I love this Rebecca!! Children need to be bored to be creative. ❤️