Thrifty Travel With Kids – The Magic Bag Trick
March 3, 2009 by Katelyn Thomas
Filed under Kid Stuff
Have you ever seen your plans for a thrifty trip go up in smoke because, after three or four hundred repetitions of “I’m bored, Mom,” you ran into the nearest convenience store and bought every junky little game or activity book you could lay your hands on? Have you agreed to stop at the rest stop for costly drinks because the kids can’t wait another minute for a drink?
Our family never had these problems because we always pack a “magic bag” filled with things for the trip. Inside the bag, we put:
- Prepackaged drinks, like Capri Sun or Ssips. We tried a lot of different money saving things, like a huge cooler that has a spout and little sippy cups, but they made a mess when we were dealing with the under ten set. For us, it made sense to just look for a good sale and buy a few packs of drinks to tuck away for trips.
- Snacks. Think about crumbs, stickiness quotient and the ability to hang around in a bag without refrigeration when you’re choosing yours. We usually did PB and marshmallow sandwiches, apples that we pre-washed and goldfish crackers in baggies.
- A notebook filled with car game ideas. It can be easy to forget all the fun things you can do in a car if you don’t have something to remind you. Just jot down ideas as you think of them and then you can refer to the book when 25 little voices yell, “Are we there yet?” from the back seat. (School bus trips. Gotta love em!)
- Books on tape. (I guess now we’d have a portable DVD player and movies, but we loved books on tape. The library still carries books on CD, but I noticed the cassette tapes are gone, so if you only have a tape player in your car, you may have difficulty finding books on tape to play on it.)
- Silly stocking stuffer type things that were 90% off after Christmas or another holiday. (Card games, like Old Maid or Crazy Eights, were a big hit.) It was like Christmas in the car to have a parent suddenly pull something out of the bag that was brand new.
In case you’re still trying to think of car games, here are a few we liked to play:
- Sing a long to Head and Shoulders, If You’re Happy and You Know It or other songs where the kids could move a bit in their seats.
- I Spy (Keep the things you spy in the car.)
- Sentence stories. Someone begins the story with a sentence like “Harry woke up and realized he wasn’t in his own bed at home.” Then, the next person adds a sentence of his or her own. It sounds simple, but we would do it for an hour or so and our stories would get crazier and crazier.
- Find all the letters in the alphabet on signs and billboards. (A variation of the 50 states license plates game that works for places where you’re just not seeing many different license plates.)
- Guess the animal.
What do you do to keep costs down when you travel with kids?
photo by Flávio Takemoto
That reminds me of when I was a chaperone for when the girls’ softball team went to a Red Sox game. I knew 12 year old girls wouldn’t last long, so I packed licorice, lollipops, drinks, bubble stuff and beach balls. They thought I was Mary Poppins.
My kids are almost grown and still play the alphabet game. My husband cheats and won’t say any letters out loud incase anyone else could keep up.