Long car journeys with kids – road trip strategies

The Summer family holiday awaits! Our latest trip was a big family reunion in Scotland, renting out an amazing manor house for all 13 of us (including 6 children) near Oban.

This meant a 9 hour drive from London with a 6yo, 4yo and a 1yo…

[I’ve listed my recommendations of in-car games and activities (that don’t include screens or reading) at the end of this post if you want to scroll past the road trip strategies.]

There are various ways we could have managed this. We did contemplate a train or plane journey to Glasgow then renting a car, but with car seats, travel cots etc., it was just easier to take our stuff with us in our own car. Plus it’s a much smaller carbon footprint.

That decided, how to tackle a 9 hour journey with the kids? Travel all day with plenty of stops and play breaks? Overnight driving? In the end we tried it two ways…

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Outbound: Breaking up the outbound journey with an overnight hotel stay.

The plan was for my husband to get home earlyish from work, we all have an early dinner and set off at 18:30, so the kids fall asleep fairly quickly and we get to Glasgow for 1am, staying in a Premier Inn. This left the final picturesque two-and-a-half hours to drive in the morning.

The reality was that, with last minute packing, loading up the bike rack etc, we left an hour later than planned. With the late night driving we were drinking caffeinated drinks to stay awake and proceeded to stop every two hours for fuel, coffee and/or comfort breaks.

On the plus side, the kids slept beautifully in the car. Except when we stopped for the aforementioned breaks.

We finally made it to the hotel at 3am and everyone was out like a light almost instantly. Littlie was up at 06:30 😴.

But we had a great hotel breakfast and felt vaguely revived for our next leg. The kids seemed fine, but I was struggling with lack of sleep, having done the late driving shift, and getting up with the baby to let the other sleep later.

So, we decided not to give ourselves a deadline to get to our accommodation 2.5hrs away. We found a local soft play and let the kids spend their morning playing, then had an early lunch and set off again to sync with Littlie’s nap.

Score out of 10: 6/10. Day 2 of the travel went perfectly – happy children and parents all round. The late night travel on day 1, however, was very draining for the parents… not an ideal start to an active holiday.

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Return journey: Doing the whole thing in one go, mostly at night.

Taking lessons from our outbound trip (and not being limited by work), we decided to leave earlier at 15:00, have a leisurely stop for dinner, and then blitz the rest of the journey in one go.

This went surprisingly well. The kids napped at around 17:00 thanks to an exhausting but fun holiday, we stopped at 18:30 for dinner, set off at 19:30 and drove back to London, split nicely into two 3hr journeys with a toilet & fuel break in between.

Thanks to her earlier nap, Middlie didn’t sleep until 22:00, but she wasn’t being difficult. Otherwise, the trip went off without a hitch and we got home at 01:20.

The only negative point is that this leg required driver concentration until late at night, and I hadn’t slept or napped sufficiently to be of any use on that front – sick children all week meant serious lack of sleep for me!!

Top tips that helped:

• Stopping for dinner at 18:30 helped thin out any remaining rush hour traffic, so the journey was nice and quite.
• It sounds obvious, but try not to drink too much in the hours before you head off. And synchronise toilet stops.
• Next time you fly anywhere, take all the sick bags you can find! Having them handy in the car will be a lifesaver. (Biggie was still getting over a tummy bug – more on that on the next blog post)
• I was pleasantly surprised by the Cairn Lodge services stop, part of the Westmorland services group (with 4 other locations) – I’ve never had such a love motorway stop before. Farmshop, eco-credentials, home made meals, a soft-play, and a very non-service-stop vibe. Well done!

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Score out of 10: 9/10. Views of the most picturesque part of the journey in the afternoon, mostly sleeping children, smooth traffic… Kudos to my husband who did all the driving. Points deducted for the late night, but waking up in your own bed was wonderful.

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Keeping them entertained – Car game ideas:

• We’ve learnt from painful experience not to rely on DVDs/books/colouring due to travel-sickness. Books on tape are a good solution.
• Old favourites like Simon Says, cloud shapes, and I Spy still work well.
• ‘Spot the orange car’ is a good game (there are more than you think).
• Guess the song: take turns humming a well-known song and everyone else has to guess it. With our age range of kids it’s predominantly Disney songs and tv show theme tunes.
• As a movie-buff, I love telling the kids ‘stories’; namely versions of my favourite films. They love hearing adventures from Indiana Jones, Herbie (The Love Bug) and Jurassic Park. I can edit out any unsuitable content or make it kid-friendly as I tell it. Anything goes really: The Goonies, Adventures in Babysitting, Big, Freaky Friday… Anything you know the story well enough to re-tell!

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