Holiday Travel ~ 2010

[oliviar519]

We have decided that as our boys big gift this Christmas we are taking them to Disney for the week , they won't find out until Christmas morning that we are leaving that night. The only snag is that we are driving 18 hours from NJ to Fl. My questions is, those of you who are planning to travel with kids this holiday season (especially in cars) how do you plan to entertain them? I would love to hear your ideas (would LOVE even more, free or close to free ideas.)

[Mothernature]

If you are taking the Amtrak Auto train, there are plenty of activities to keep kids busy.

My son has a DS I received for free after airline points. I redeemed NFO points for a $10 Amazon gift card and $10 PP. I caught a free $15 Amazon gift card deal. I will pick up Sonic Colors DS on Amazon for free.

I took advantage of the free Tag books at Target.

My husband and I also have registered for the Amex $25 statement credit WYB $25 from a small independent business. My son likes comics so we'll hit the local independent comic store for free comics.

I picked up a $5 portable DVD player and $5 Apple I-pod at garage sales. We'll take his favorite movies and albums.

[oliviar519]

I have picked up quite a few DS games for them, a few new movies and some new books, they are only 4 & 6 so it's not like I could get them really long books to read.

I was thinking of asking family to buy them some travel games and coloring books for Christmas.

[leqet]

I don't have kids, but my family drove 18+ hours to Disney several times when I was a kid. We used to play a lot of simple games while riding in the car since that was in the time before handheld video game, i-pods and dvd players.

One that was fun and I still play while on road trips to this day is the spot the states license plate game. Basically you look at the cars passing and write down when you see a state, trying to find as many states as you can. Most years we saw all 50 states (including Alaska and Hawaii!) by the time the trip was over. If your kids are too little to write the states names you could photocopy the US map from your road atlas and let them color in the state when they see it (you would have to point out where the sate is of course). If they are old enough to write it teaches them how to spell the states names too.

Other games we played a lot were "I spy" and "twenty questions" but that can get annoying after a while.

Another thing my parents did was they bribed us by giving us nickels for every hour or half hour we were good. If we started fighting with each other or something then they took a nickel away. When we got to Disney the bag of change was cashed in for dollars and it became our spending money. With inflation you would probably want to do quarters or silver dollars instead if you did that. My DH thinks I was horribly spoiled and hates the idea of bribing children, but it worked for us and also taught us how to count money at the same time, lol.