Ideas for things to do on the drive down....

[Dagny]

Our family will driving from Dallas to Orlando in just under a month (woo hoo). We will be traveling with a 4 and 12 year old. I am looking for some creative ideas to help them pass the time.

 

[dthogue]

I purchased a lot of different colored pipe cleaners for my girls on our last trip. They can be twisted into many different things (be creative)

I photocopied a map of the United States and gave each of them a highlighter to color in the states we saw license plates for.

I purchased snack trays from Walmart (with the little legs) and covered w/ plain white contact paper. With a sharpie marker I made a tic tae board and a hangman board. I also gave the girls magnets to play tic tac toe and dry erase markers to color on their board.

We listened to books on tapes as well as Disney Sing along cassette tapes/CD's.

We had a scavenger hunt and played all the typical in the car games. Our favoirte is finding a license plate w/ letters then making a sentence or phrase w/ the letters - example ABC 123 - All babies cry? We also like the alphabet game - start w/ "I'm going to disney and I'm bringing a Apple, next person repeats the phrase says the a world followed by a b word and so on down the alphabet, its fun to see if you can remember what everyone said. You can also make it challenging by picking a catergory like girls names or foods, etc.

With a little creativity you will be there in no time. We also give out small gifts every hour.

Have a great trip!

 

[JudithM]

We also play a license plate game. We keep a list of the different license plates we see. It will be amazing what we find! You might also want to keep track of radio stations you like, so you can find them again on the way home.

 

[puffkin]

This isn't creative, but you can usually rent a DVD player for the car and watch Disney movies on the way to pass the time.

 

[CamColt]

We have driven from MA to WDW(24 hrs straight) 2x and plan to do it again this summer(our kids will be 6 & 3 this time). Along the lines of what Puffkin said, we have found the biggest help is the tv/vcr combo. You can buy them for pretty cheap now. Last year our oldest was really into the shows on Nick GAS so we taped a bunch of those. It did get repetative for us, but he could have watched those same shows the entire time.
I packed a lot of toys for the kids and I have to say they didnt really need as many as I brought. Between sleeping time and the tv they only needed a few.
Snacks are always good to occupy some time too.