Top tips for travel days
Have food prepared in advance for breakfast and lunch. We have a long to do list in the mornings on travel days to get the RV packed up and ready to move, so quick breakfasts our essential. I usually make pancakes/muffins/breakfast tacos ahead of time and then pop them in the microwave for a healthy and easy travel day breakfast. I also prep our lunches and snacks so that we can grab the cooler quickly on the way out. Also have ingredients for a quick meal on hand for after you arrive at your new destination. Usually after a long travel day, no one feels like cooking a fancy meal, but we also don’t want to mindlessly spend $60+ on a meal out just out of convenience, so we make sure to have a quick meal or an already prepped/frozen meal ready to go for when we arrive and get set-up.
Clean and pack as much as possible the day beforehand. We typically reserve the day before we travel as a cleaning and packing day, meaning that we don’t have any activities planned for that day. This helps tremendously when it comes to travel day.
Snacks, snacks and more snacks! My kids can’t survive a day in the car without snacks (and our rig can’t fit through any drive-thrus!), so we always make sure to have a ton of snacks on hand. Our go-to healthy snacks: cheese sticks, fruit/nut mixes, yogurt melts, peanut butter crackers, Kind bars, yogurt pouches, fruit, homemade bars - https://feedingtinybellies.com/ has some of my favorite healthy recipes for littles!
Amazon Fire Kids Tablet - I know, I know, screen time, but hear me out! This tablet lets the parent control a lot of aspects of screen time, so we use some of this travel time for our little dude to do his learning games in letter and number recognition as well as watch his favorite shows.
Let everyone get out and stretch their legs every 2-3 hours. Sometimes, this just isn’t possible depending on where we are and if there are any locations that we can fit into to safely stop (and yes, it makes the drive longer), but we try! It seems to keep everyone (particularly the one year old) a little happier on long drives.
Keep a bin of favorite toys & mess-free activities in the car at all times. A few of our favorite toys that seem to keep the kiddos entertained for longer than just five minutes: LeapFrog tablet, Transformers toys, Montessori Toy Busy Book, maze books and ImagineInk books.
To plan our safest travel routes (and make sure we won’t be going under any bridges too small!), find gas stations that we can fit into, the best RV parks for our crew, etc, we use RV Life. It is a user-friendly website to keep all of our travel plans in one easy to access place.
Pick out some Podcasts for the drive ahead of time. This allows good ole mom & dad to agree on something we both are interested in listening to (or learning about) prior to the drive, so that there is hopefully no arguing on the already stressful travel days!