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This summer, hundreds of thousands of families will pack up their kids and head for airports and train stations to begin their summer vacation. Others will opt to pile everyone into the family car or mini-van and hit America’s highways. Either way, the trip requires forethought and extensive planning. Being organized makes things easier for everyone involved.
Our family has traveled with kids for the last twenty years. Our youngest is six now, and we think we’ve mastered this fine art and earned the honor of calling ourselves experts at kid-travel. The following tips have proved invaluable to us time and time again.
1. Provide each child with a travel amusement kit. This should be made up of items that
are used only for travel. One new item could be added for subsequent trips.
Toddlers through age eight enjoy age appropriate books. Small dry-erase boards
with attached markers work well, too. Highway Bingo is a favorite for car travel—
players match trucks, buses, road signs, etc., with those on Bingo card. All children
ages three and up should have a portable cassette or CD player with headphones.
When returning home, put the travel kit (sans the CD or cassette player) away until
next time/
2. Dress children in brightly colored T-shirts or hats. This helps if they become separated from Mom and Dad. Bright colors stand out in airport crowds.
3. Bring snacks like grapes, cheerios, fruit roll-ups, and juice boxes. These make
minimal mess in the car, and are often much better both nutritionally and for finicky eaters than the high sodium options on planes.
4. On car trips, be flexible about destination times. Detours and unexpected stops
can sometimes wind up being the best part of the trip.
5. On plane trips to locations like amusement parks, leave time in daily itineraries
to return to your hotel for a swim and a nap. This is refreshing for everyone, and
enables travelers to enjoy some of the amenities their accommodations offer.
6. Ever feel like you haul more junk home than you left with? Limit souvenirs to
one or two well-chosen items. Explain this to kids prior to departure and make the search for the perfect items part of the vacation fun.
7. Invest in small pilot’s cases for even small children. Pack pajamas on the top.
This is especially helpful at bedtime. Even the smallest pilot’s cases can hold four days worth of clothing for a 5-10 year old.
8. Always travel with a first-aid kit from home. This can mend minor injuries and
save the expense of shopping in vacation destination stores where prices are generally inflated.
9. Mail your dirty laundry home. Sending a large box through the Postal Service at
The standard delivery rate can free travelers from hauling cumbersome luggage through airports and may provide extra room in the car. Upon returning home, simply put away all the clean items in the suitcases and wait for the dirty laundry to arrive.
10. Rather than purchasing expensive souvenirs for folks at home, turn vacation
snapshots into souvenirs by having kids craft interesting frames from wooden sticks, cardboard, and vacation seashells, leaves, or dried flowers. This also makes for a little post-vacation fun to ward off the doldrums of returning home.
A family tip could wind up being an adventure in education. Whether your vacation includes a trip to visit a relative or an adventure to an amusement park, there are ways to intertwine a bit of reading, writing, and arithmetic into the fun.
1. Does your relative live on a farm, by the ocean, or near a National PArk? There are loads of opportunities within these scenarios to incorporate learning.
2. Theme parks like Busch Gardens, Sea World, and Disney World offer an extravaganza of learning opportunities. Epcot Center provides visits to countries all over the world, as well as peeks into environmentalism, farming, the human body, and the living seas. Busch Gardens offers its visitors a glimpse into the lives of the most remarkable of the ocean's living creatures. And Busch Gardens affords families a safari without getting even close to the continent of Africa.
3. A visit to a metropolis like Manhattan or Boston presents families with a wealth of diversions--most of which are educational. Culture centers, arts programs, and these city's rich histories offer something for everyone.
No, of course it is known that summer means TIME OFF from school, but who said learning couldn't be fun? Integrate bits and pieces of family learning into your travels this summer, and both the students and parents will emerge as winners. (And there will undoubtedly be a topic for that proverbial "What I Did on Summer Vacation" topic!)
The opportunities for streamlining and organizing family travel are phenomenal. Aside from picking up a tip or two from veteran family travelers, the best advice ever offered was to simply try new ways of pairing down and quelling the unnecessary. And this is one area where practice really does make perfect!
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