How to have the BEST road trips!!

Oh gosh, family vacations are the best!!! I seriously live for these--not even necessarily the destination, but just having MY KIDS AROUND AND TO MYSELF. Something I have appreciated so much as our kids get older and have so many different commitments and we are rarely home together as a family without scheduling it (I kid you not) months in advance. So these times when we are all together in some awesome place--just the best. 

Of course, you have to get there first!! For our family, it makes the most sense to drive, so we've gotten really good at figuring out how to make those drives as fun as possible, and I want to make yours fun too! 

If you know us, you know that we love our road trips!! This year we have a trip planned to southern Utah, one to northern Montana, and another to Key West at the very most southern tip of Florida. (Seems like we need to get the Pacific coast in there somewhere!) 

I wrote a how-to road trip post a few years ago, but it's six years old and could use some updates for older kids, so here you go--that's what is happening on the blog today! I've included our favorite tips to really enjoy your road trip, along with links to our favorite toys, games, and lifesavers (Dramamine, I'm looking at you!). 

1) Be as organized as you can

Some things that we do: 

 a) Each kid has an Adidas Sackpack bag that they keep their "road trip entertainment" stuff in. They can bring whatever they want, but it has to fit in the bag! Everything goes BACK in the bag before we get out at each stop. 

 b) Assign jobs, especially when they are little! We used to have "row captains" that would be in charge of passing out snacks, collecting trash, etc. Now the kids can handle this themselves, but it was a GREAT move when they were younger (and don't forget to keep a trash bag in the car, preferably a stack of them so you can throw them away at each stop. 

c) Pre-pack bulk snacks into smaller sizes. It's so nice to be able to just toss back portioned stuff without making people take handfuls and pass it around. 

d) When our children (and their clothes) were smaller, I would pack each outfit in a labeled Ziploc gallon-sized bag. No searching! I don't do this for adults, but I LOVE it for kids (I also specify on the label if it's a special outfit, like for church or a wedding or something). I save all the bags and just reuse them for each subsequent trip. This also makes it really easy to pack a "go bag" so you can just have one tiny bag with pajamas and outfits for the next day if you're stopping somewhere overnight. And if someone gets sick in the car, voila, you have outfits ready to go AND a Ziploc to put the soiled clothes in. 

e) I am a big fan of eating meals in the car (no time wasted in stopping + keeps kids busy in the car, and I just vacuum later), so I think carefully about what things my kids love enough that I won't have to cajole them into eating. This definitely works better for some children than others. :-) In addition to the standard sandwiches, we also do some items that are made in advance at home & then frozen until the trip--nice because you can do this a week or two ahead! (muffins, energy balls, pizza pockets, oven-baked chimichangas, etc.). We always have lots of fruit & veggies on hand to round things out, and if I'm feeling daring we go for disposable yogurt cups. 

2) Plan creatively for in-car entertainment 

We have a DVD player in our car, but I try to minimize using it, mostly because people get grouchy and also...I just don't like screens. So we bring lots of audiobooks, picture books, chapter books (when we went to Glacier a few years ago Juliet managed to sneak TWENTY-SEVEN books into the car) and a few select small toys. Some years I wrap up the toys in aluminum foil and we open one every hour or hundred miles or something like that. There are a ton of road trip toys out there, so here are our favorites:  this Cubebot was a HUGE hit and Luke probably spent at least 15 hours playing with it the first year! I also bought a Water Wow book for each kid when they were younger, added these bingo cards to our stash of printable/laminated ones, and we were totally fascinated with these atlases targeted for kids. We love this magnetic cube puzzle so much that we've bought it twice. Wiki Stixx are also super fun, this squeezable water toy kept Matthew entertained for HOURS when he was three and four (and the older kids too, haha), and this LCD drawing tablet is only $11 and perfect for younger kids. One of our favorite car toys are these Plus Plus blocks, which are all interchangeable so it doesn't matter if you drop one and can't find it (looking at you, Legos), and these Squigzz are also really fun to build out from the windows. We added this Rush Hour traffic game last year that was super fun, and we have every single IQ Link puzzle out there (our favorites are the IQ Link Twist and the Puzzler Pro). We've tried looooooots of other things but all those ones listed up there were solid gold for our family. I also keep all of our "road trip entertainment" toys in one bag in our storage room so that everything stays together and stays unique & exciting for the next trip. 

For past road trips, I made "road trip folders" that included all kinds of printables from Pinterest. Now I just check through these and update as need be depending on what's been used. I bought this Melissa and Doug Scissor Skills and Tape set for Matthew last year, and he absolutely loved them, so definitely recommend those. The Paint by Sticker books are a total fan favorite of every single person in our family; they come in both kid versions and adults (I've ordered the Masterpieces book twice!) We also really love to do these at our destination; they're perfect for chilling at a picnic table or around the campfire. 

Our favorite audiobooks are the Classical Kids CDs (this 4-disc set has the best ones!) and the Chronicles of Narnia (this one is so so fabulous!!).  We also have this Peter and the Wolf/Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra that is always a huge hit (well, Nathan requested it 11 times so all the rest of us love it a little less now...). And Dick King-Smith's The Water Horse is dearly beloved. We always get on Overdrive and put stuff on hold a month or so in advance--always a Harry Potter or two and Dealing with Dragons was a smash hit last year! :-) We play most things over the whole car speakers (I really try to keep it family-centered), but occasionally people just need to do their own thing, so our kids also each have a cheap little MP3 player full of their own music and books. 

3) Plan stops & routes carefully 

We prefer to drive through the night--I know that's not for everyone! But it works really well for us. We play a white noise app through the car speakers and pass out eye masks and everyone conks out (except the driver, haha; we usually trade halfway through the night). 

We often look for something fun to do along our route the first day (and then try to time it so we drive through the night and arrive at our destination the next morning, so we are minimizing awake time in the car. Last year we stopped at the St. Louis Zoo and it was perfect--we've also stopped at the St. Louis Arch. It's a good 4-5 hours stopping point to get everyone out and get their legs moving. 

Another family tradition is that when we get to a gas station, everyone gets a treat! The wheeling and dealing and candy-trading then keeps everyone very occupied for a couple of hours. :-) 

4) Planning for carsickness

I have a few kids who struggle with carsickness--this is what has been a lifesaver for me.

a) Ziploc bag clothes packets--super easy to find a change of clothes + you have something to seal the soiled clothing in without it stinking up the rest of the car.
b) Keep gallon-sized Ziploc bags where you can easily reach them (for me, it's the side pocket in the passenger door). After the kid is done throwing up into them, you can seal them without any leakage until you get to a trash can.
c) Baby wipes! Lots and lots of baby wipes. I just keep a pack in the side door. 
d) Dramamine!! A total lifesaver; I just have it on subscribe and save. We prefer the chewable kids' kind. Altoids are also key for us; we pass one back whenever someone is feeling queasy. 

And there you have it! All of my best tips and tricks. Hope you have a phenomenal trip with your family and that you feel confident in your ability to summit every mountain in front of you! :-) 

Vail

At the end of January, my parents came and stayed with the kids for a few days so Neil and I could go on our first trip together since before Matthew was born! This was both very exciting and very nerve-wracking, mostly because the brand-new custom-fit ski boots I bought last year were pretty terrible the first couple days and I was super nervous that they would be a problem again this year. 

I was SO nervous that I asked Neil to give me a blessing before our first day of skiing. 

We got up bright and early and lined up Thursday morning at Lionshead just after the lifts opened! It was a stormy day and snowed pretty constantly the whole day. 

Visibility was very low but gosh it was beautiful!!




I think it snowed 3-4 inches that day. My boots were not feeling fantastic but they weren't feeling as awful as I had worried they might. It wasn't the conditions I would have picked for our first day, but we had a great time. 



We went into the back bowls for a few runs but it was IMPOSSIBLE to see anything and I was pretty nervous, so I ended up taking the cat track down to the bottom (it was 6 kilometers long and holy crap that it is a long way to ski on a cat track, which is legitimately my least favorite way to get down a mountain...just so uncomfortable flexing forward that long and I usually do anything possible to avoid cat tracks, but I also didn't feel like venturing into double black terrain when I couldn't see what was in front of me!). 



We had such a fun day and my boots mostly cooperated! I took them off for lunch in the lodge because my toes were totally numb and I couldn't feel anything, but my calves were feeling pretty decent and I was able to ski all day. 



When I took my boots off at the end of the day, my calves started cramping like CRAZY!!! We walked back into the village and I was barely shuffling around. It was so weird and painful, and the whole time we were at dinner I was just in a ton of pain and dying to get back to the hot tub at our hotel. 

When I took my socks off back at the hotel I was pretty shocked to see the shape my feet were in...I've had my fair share of black toenails from running but I've never had three that were fully black after a single day of exertion. Yikes! I managed to drain the blood but my calves were just crazy painful and I had trouble sleeping that night, despite copious ibuprofen, stretching, massage, and the hot pad I'd brought from home. Note: they were so badly damaged that they fully detached when we'd been home for just a couple of days, and I am now rocking 2 bare nailbeds and hoping the third hangs on. Second note: we went back to the ski shop at home that fitted me and found out that the guy who had sold me the boots was fired, so I ended up getting the full price back on a gift card. Validating to know that it wasn't just my imagination, but pretty frustrating that it had impacted two ski trips. 

You can probably see where this is going...when we booted up at Keystone the next day I was in agony. Just so so so much pain that I was shaking the whole way down on the first run. I rebuckled everything and on the second run I legitimately thought I was going to have to call ski patrol to get me down...my calves were screaming and I could not stand upright. I was full-on sobbing by the time I got to the bottom. I decided to go back to our hotel for the day and spent the whole day working on my calves...hot pad, epsom salts baths, massage, stretching, rinse and repeat. When the lifts closed I drove back to Keystone and picked Neil up--he had had a FABULOUS day skiing and skied all the crazy extreme hard stuff and was totally wiped out! It was a pretty big bummer to miss out on a day of skiing given how much we'd paid to be there, but I was glad that he had at least been able to have a phenomenal day of sking terrain that he would have not skied if I had been there. 

Thankfully, we had another day, and I had brought my old boots just in case my new boots acted the way I thought they would. Neil gave me another blessing, I dosed myself with Ibuprofen and Midol, and we hit the slopes at Vail again on the most beautiful bluebird day you could imagine. 

It took me a couple of hours to figure out the best way to buckle my boots (they were too big and so if I buckled them tight enough to lock my ankle in, my whole foot/shin went numb after about ten minutes, but if I left them loose enough to avoid numbness, they just felt clunky and like lead weights rather than being responsive and quick). After a couple of pretty miserable runs I told Neil to head towards the back bowls and that I was just going to keep skiing easy stuff while I worked on figuring my boots out. Somehow I hit the magic combo after 2 runs and then I headed into the bowls!

I took this selfie halfway down China Bowl when I realized I had my boots figured out and I was just SO overjoyed. 

And then the rest of the day was just legitimate pure bliss. 

I cannot possibly overstate how amazingly huge the terrain at Vail is. It just goes on forever. Comparison: I learned to ski at Solitude in Utah, which has 1,200 skiable acres. Vail has 5,317. The back bowls alone are over 3,000 acres! It's just INSANELY huge. In the photo below I'm about 12 miles from the base where we started that morning. 

Lots of people taking photos at this little bench--it was a pretty dreamy spot!

Eating lunch near one of the elk statues at Two Elks

After lunch we headed over to Blue Sky Basin, which is the most remote of the basins at Vail and had very few people there (as compared to some of the front mountain where we were waiting 40ish minutes for lifts...ugh!). 


My pole in this photo is pointing back to the run in Tea Cup Bowl where I took that selfie. 

This was my very favorite run at Vail--it was called Cloud Nine and was just these kind of rolling gentle glades where you could ski between the trees and feel like you were a little more legit than you actually are (intermediate run, not a crazy double black glade like Neil was skiing the day before so hard that he smashed all the baskets off his ski poles on the rocks). The first time I skied this Neil was waving me towards the cat-track part and I really hate cat tracks so I decided to go the other way and ended up in a four-foot-wide black diamond gully with exposed rocks and people blazing past me. Terrifying but exhilarating (probably more scary for Neil than for me, since he had no idea where I was until he pulled up my location and was like oh crap...). 

So beautiful...wish we had another couple of days!! 

And then we went back to our hotel room and ate my favorite meal of the whole trip...Subway in our hotel room + Lindt truffles and several hours of just lying in bed channel-surfing which was somehow so satisfying and fun after beating the crap out of our legs on the mountain. 

 I think the hardest thing about these trips is realizing how much we wish we lived closer to the mountains so that this was a normal Saturday family activity instead of a once-every-six-years couples thing. The wheels are turning...

Day 8

Missed a few days there...oh well. 

1) We had three snow days total (well, elearning days with snow time in the afternoon) and the kids build a fantastic fort/tunnel system in the basement window well, scooping away the snow from the windows so that if you were inside the basement, it was like watching an ant farm. 

2) I really relished all the sleep during our elearning days...I slept in until 8 or 9 most days. I was just so tired and it felt like the first time I had caught up on sleep since the holidays. 

3) The trails were clear enough today that I could run outside again for the first time in a week. 8 miles in the sunshine and it was sooo good to see blue skies again. 

4) Luke had a really great experience at his band try-on yesterday and is really excited to play the trumpet next fall!

5) We made huge progress with Juliet's big big project last night for National History Day...this has been stressing her out so bad for months but last night we just about finished it up. It will be a relief to everyone when it's over! 

Day 3: snow day!

Not sure how the formatting will work out since I’m doing this from my phone. Oh well! 

1) Another day of elearning (and a third one tomorrow) since we finally have decent snow!! 

2) The kids spent half of the day building a very elaborate snow cave/fort on the side of the house. Isaac told his piano teacher about it and then took a selfie with it and asked me to text it to her which I thought was adorable. 

3) Last night I did the 1000-piece Jane Austen puzzle that my grandma gave us a few years ago while I listened to Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.” Various kids trickled in and worked on it with me and I didn’t realize they were paying such close attention until my phone died and everyone yelled “Hey I was listening to that!” So I plugged it in and we listened to nine chapters while we finished the puzzle. Such a nice evening. (And Juliet made cookies.) 

 4) Recovery day on workouts today which is always so nice…a walk in the snow, yoga, and 15 minutes with my foam roller which HURTS SO GOOD. 

5) So excited to sleep in again tomorrow! I really love these snow days. 

Day 2

1) My big accomplishment blog-wise: finally organizing all the photos from Christmas into one post here!  

2) I was able to move the little boys' optometrist appointment up three hours so I wouldn't get stuck in the sleet forecast for the afternoon (although as I type this it's still rain, not snow or ice...). 

3) School was just declared another elearning day for tomorrow, which I always REALLY appreciate when it's announced the night before rather than 3 AM. Last night we watched a movie together as a family (can't remember the last time we were all home to do that) and it was so fun and cozy. 

4) Elearning went pretty well today and I was able to do half my workout (30 min full body strength) before the kids started elearning and the other half (40 min Peloton) when they were finished. I am still struggling with endurance and definitely do not have the athletic capacity I had pre-Covid, so I'm hoping that comes back soon. I can get to about 70% of my normal outputs on the bike (interesting because it doesn't seem to affect running...maybe because I've just run for so many years through so much crap that my body has an easier time with it?). 

5) My Amazon shipments got here before the storm, which means I now have a paper copy of the book I was rereading on my Overdrive account but it expired and I'm 35th in line. It's the little things, right? Haha!

Five for February in 2022

I have a few other posts that are drafts just waiting for me to find time to organize them, but for now, let's launch into the only time of the year I blog with any regularity. :-) 

Today's good things:

1) This morning I returned the custom-fitted verrrrrry expensive ski boots that have been a misery for my last two ski trips. This has been hanging over me (feeling like they're so pricey I really had to make them work!) and it was such a relief today to be rid of them AND have the shop owner look at who had fitted them to me and tell me that it was no wonder I had been so miserable. Validation!

2) Despite multiple black/leaking toenails that have been super painful (thank you aforementioned boots) I was able to run 8 pain-free miles today! Such a relief and so nice to get some good running in before the storm hits tomorrow. 

 3) Epsom salts! They have been my BFF the last few days and I just picked up another box of them at Costco today. Very grateful for their healing properties!!

4) We have piano lessons today for the little boys and I always look forward to that quiet hour waiting for them where I go through my inbox and deal with everything that's been piling up. 

5) Matty and I are about to make oatmeal cookies as soon as I finish this post...Isaac has been asking for them all week and I'm looking forward to surprising him when he walks in the door!