Road Trips

While the family road trip will never approximate the heedless romance of Jack Kerouac and his cast of rebels, you will get the sense—between the totally inconvenient pit stops and the backseat pinching wars—that your car on the open road is in fact a memory-making machine. You will also tap into your own nostalgia, going back to the days of no bike helmets or seat belts, when the family wagon’s vinyl seats in the waaaay-back seemed to become permanently imprinted on the backs of our thighs all summer long. But if you are a parent, you realize that spontaneity requires planning: It’s all about just enough of the right provisions to keep hands occupied and appetites sated, so your brood is ripe for roadside inspiration. Here are some of my suggestions:

• Snack-ready. Pack tasty snacks that don’t require refrigeration and are low on processed sugar, so as to preempt the sweet tantrum. Almonds, pretzels, sliced apples, dried cherries, and fruit leather are delicious and relatively tidy (unlike crackers). We keep them up front, so whoever is the in the passenger seat doesn’t have to unbuckle and contort to dispense them. Make real sweets a destination/pit stop—i.e., use the local ice cream parlor as coolly calculated bribery for good behavior. Plus, you can have the kids run the sugar off while you’re out of the car before buckling back in.
• Meal-ready. Buy a soft-structured cooler (one that can be smushed down so it doesn’t take up much space when you are done) in which you can store heartier, more perishable food options for the family for a quick meal at a rest stop. We like tortillas with cheese and pan-toasted beans (or chicken or beef). Wrap them snugly in foil so they can be eaten at room temperature with minimal mess.
• Mess-ready. Keep the following, all within hands’ reach: wipes for bottoms and sticky hands, water bottles for drinking and larger cleanup, and plastic bags (and ginger tabs) for carsickness.
• Mom DJ. Download new (new being the operative word) music, or buy a couple of CDs to keep everyone entertained. Better yet, if your kids are old enough, have them make a couple of mix CDs. Turn playing them into a game: Whoever can keep his hands to himself long enough gets to play his CD on the car stereo! It’s all in the anticipation.
• Food detours. Check out Roadfood.com and Chowhound.com for inspired ideas. (These sites are best for families for whom eating is the adventure.)
• GPS. Assume you will get lost—but set the GPS anyway. You will radically reduce the number (and tenor) of arguments between driver and navigator, and it will allow you to take greater off-the-beaten-path “scenic route” risks (and aren’t they what road trips are all about?) without the fear of never finding your way back. Besides, GPS also mitigates the exasperated navigator’s temptation to “just ask someone!”
• The primal scream. Resort to one when necessary (this is, perhaps, the most important piece of advice). At least once per road trip—usually when we have reached a complete stop in traffic for 10 minutes, after crawling at a mere 15 miles an hour for the previous half hour on the highway—we all look forward to the highly cathartic group yell. Try it once and you’ll find how addictive it really is. Kids of all ages will get the hang of it in no time!