Tips For Travelling With Toddlers…Without Tech/Gadgets!

Impossible you say??? Read on my friends…

From Kim Copithorne

This past June/July my little family of four went on quite the adventure!
We decided to pack up the car, go on a road trip across three Provinces, and catch a train all the way North to Churchill on the Hudson Bay. Churchill is a town that is full of Polar Bears and Beluga Whales.
Some people thought we were crazy to take two very small kids (who are 3 years old and 16 months) all that way in a car and a 17 hour train ride. Then when they heard *gasp* that we weren’t bringing technology to entertain the kids they really thought we were nuts!
We travelled a total of 5,200 kilometers/ 3,232 miles with a grand total of 72 hours of travel time with barely any meltdowns.
If you are wondering how we managed, well we were organized and prepared.
Pintrest has sucha plethora of knowledge and resources for cute ideas. I pinned a million pins on how to road trip with small kids and one thing that bugged me was how many had technology as the key to help the kids get through it.
It’s not that I don’t like technology, but I am a kid of the 80’s and 90’s where we had to entertain ourselves the old fashioned way by reading, coloring, and playing with toys. So I figured my kids could do the same.
Honestly they don’t really use any technology at home besides the TV, but no iPads and they don’t know how to use the computer. I know one day they will be all over that stuff but why not let them play the old fashioned way for now.

Back to the point, I decided on a few ideas I liked:
Have a tray that was magnetic for them to play on: I got the instructions on how to do this on Two Sisters Crafters.
The only thing I changed was I used pillow stuffing material versus the bean bag stuffing. But what an awesome idea to use a cookie sheet for a travel tray.

Have a little basket full of toys and coloring supplies:
I bought little shower caddy baskets from the Dollarama and just brought some of their favorite smaller toys and coloring supplies. My son is still pretty young so he just wanted trucks, cars, dinosaurs, and little men that he could bash together.

Fill a Ziploc bag with different activities and crafts that they can do every day in the car: I separated 10 Ziploc bags (one for each day gone) with various crafts, stickers, bingo games, and I-spy games. Again I went to the Dollar store and just stocked up on tons of fun things for cheap. Every day I gave my daughter a new bag and she would get so excited and say, “Mommy what activities do I get to do today?”.
We also brought a Hello Kitty Lego set that was fairly small and that entertained her every day for over an hour. My little man still likes to eat craft supplies so he got jumbo stickers and cut-outs that had magnets on them so he could experiment with the cookie tray.

Fill Ziploc bags that are separated for the days of travel with snacks: This one was a big one. I decided to separate 10 Ziploc bags for each of the kids with snacks. They each got a new bag when we would get in the car or train in the morning and it was full of snacks for the day. I didn’t have to reach back and constantly get them snacks because the bags were right beside them and they could help themselves. Besides from opening a bag every once in awhile they were quite content with their independence.

All of this planning made for such a smooth trip and has us very hopeful for future crazy long road trips. We do go back and forth to my home town Kelowna, B.C. a lot to visit my parents so we will be using all these ideas for every trip. If you’re planning a long road trip with young kids all I can say is plan and organize and it will hopefully be as smooth as ours was!

Thank You Kim!