The journey is part of the experience
Sydney-based travel writer Ben Groundwater made these road-trip mistakes so you don’t have to.
Regrets, I’ve had a few. Like the time my partner and I decided to take our two very young kids on a road trip around wine country in northern Victoria. Anyone who tells you that having kids won’t change you and that you don’t really have to alter your lifestyle is either A) a bad parent, or B) not a parent. Because you do have to change. Maybe small tweaks or perhaps wholesale alterations, but if you want to retain your sanity while also doing the important job of nurturing a tiny human into the world, you have to change.
So yeah, don’t take a three-year-old and a one-year-old on a tour of Victoria’s best cellar doors. Don’t plan to move them from accommodation to accommodation every couple of nights, constantly upsetting their sense of safety and security. Don’t put yourself in the position of having to Tetrispack the car every single morning while also trying to corral your punk kids and get everyone strapped in and ready to go to, um, another cellar door. Yay.
Sometimes I feel like my job as travel writer and new parent is to make all the obvious mistakes so I can then come back and tell you not to do the same thing. These lessons will appear simple, and yet they’re errors in judgement that I continue to make and that you probably will too.
Though I have learned a thing or two in the past five years. I have come close to almost surviving the experience of taking young children in the car on a holiday, and as the cost of living bites and grand overseas holidays become less accessible, plus as Easter approaches, it seemed a good time to share the tiny nuggets of hard-won wisdom I now possess.
To begin with, it’s worth pointing out that you need to plan activities during your road trip that will appeal directly to your children. By now, as a parent of young children you’re probably familiar with the idea that what you want really doesn’t matter any more, and that very much applies to long car journeys.
So don’t plan to hit a couple of quaint cellar doors as a way to break up those hours on the road. Instead, find the tackiest kid-friendly attraction that appears along your route, and plan to spend some time there. Your children will love it, even if you can’t wait to leave.
Plan to stop frequently, at least every couple of hours, for a decent amount of time, and embrace the big, dumb clichés when you do. Leave super-early to beat the traffic, and then stop and get breakfast at the nearest McDonald’s. Your kids will think you’re cooler than Kung Fu Panda. Stop anywhere there’s a playground so they can roar around and burn off some energy. Pull in at a beach for a picnic lunch and swim. Make the day all about the exciting stops, so that certain little people don’t think so much about the drives that connect them.
Though of course, you need entertainment in the car. And this is the perfect time to embrace modern technology, given old-school fun like the “number plate game” doesn’t work when you’re driving on a busy dual-lane highway.
We made an eight-hour playlist recently of songs that appeal to kids, but won’t drive the adults crazy. Audiobooks work really well, too. We also picked up a couple of kids’ “car tables”, which strap onto their car seats and perch on their laps, meaning they can draw and colour-in and hopefully eat snacks without spreading bits of them through the entire car (only partly works). And speaking of snacks, you’re going to need a lot of them.
Depending, too, on how obsessed you are with avoiding screen time, you could also buy a car mount for an iPad or other tablet. We bought one of these and, honestly, it’s great. It stretches between the two front-seat headrests and holds a tablet in the middle, facing the back seats.
Yes, you in the front seats will have to give up your own entertainment and instead listen to Let It Go for about the 50,000th time, but this is perfect for emergencies, for the oncoming meltdowns, for that final two-hour stretch when everyone is about to lose their mind and only Frozen will help keep a lid on everything.
And then the last thing you will need is just a whole lot of patience: For the questions, for the fights, for the complaining, for the pure distance of it all. And remember – you might not be able to visit a cellar door, but you can still finish the day with a bottle of wine.