It is the end of another month and time to recap this month’s posts on organizing your car and driving and highlight some of my favorite comments.

You generously joined me for a road trip across the U.S.–from Virginia to Tennessee, Tennessee to New Mexico, New Mexico to Utah and Utah back to Virginia.

Whenever we mentioned our trip to people as we were traveling across the United States, the number one comment we got was, “How are your kids handling that trip?” usually followed by a horror story about how the person spent hours in a car with a screaming child. Both my husband and I think our kids did great on our trip! There were occasional meltdowns but they were short-lived. We made sure to get out of the car every 3 hours and see something and we generally averaged no more than about 450 to 500 miles a day. Toward the end of our trip we had to pick up the miles and do closer to 600 a day and that may have contributed to the fatigue we felt.

There is no magic trick for how to entertain children on a long road trip. Having a positive attitude helps. Adults don’t tend to give children enough credit for how flexible and adaptable they are. Sometimes children are far better travelers than adults! Children are much better at living in the moment and appreciating little things like swingsets or dandelions in what an adult might see as an uninteresting spot.

On our trip, I used many of the car entertainment suggestions I highlighted in this post.  The bingo cards from Mom’s Minivan were a big hit. We didn’t use them for bingo but rather to help our 4-year old inventory the highway. We counted up how many motorcycles we saw, pickup trucks, buses, etc. We even added in our own items like boats, trains, birds and flatbed trucks. Another great entertainer for our kids was crayons and coloring books. A map of the United States (that we got free in the junk mail from the Sierra Club) gave our 4-year old some concept of geography and movement. We put a sticker on each city that we visited as we went. My 4-year old also liked to borrow the camera and take pictures of things inside and outside the car. Some of her creative shots actually came out really well!

We didn’t use videos. We brought along the laptop and some videos in case we needed them but the one time we brought out the laptop to watch videos our 4-year old’s behavior escalated from good to horrible in seconds. We put all the videos away and never brought them out again. It takes a little more energy to actively entertain children with games and songs but it is also part of the bonding experience.

My husband did ALL the driving on our trip and I was the backseat entertainer. When Ruth and I were chatting about this in Vegas she said that she and her husband do the same and that she thought the backseat role was a lot harder than driving. Sometimes it was tiring but I got used to it and it seems so did our children.

We discussed Tom Vanderbilt’s book, “Traffic.” During our road trip, we experienced some of the concepts he mentions like the “treadmill effect.”

Lou commented:

In our household we designate the front passenger seat as the one for the
“NAG – rivator” — the one who is well-meaning in giving driving instructions, but not really a navigator. I like to think it works like the “girlfriend effect” — and makes better drivers of us all!

I gave a basic tutorial on Google Maps. On our road trip we ended up using a variety of navigation tools. When my husband and I did a road trip 13 years ago for our honeymoon, all we had with us was a paper road atlas of the United States. 13 years later, we had his Garmin navigator, a printout from Google Maps and an iPhone to guide us. It’s a little easier to have step-by-step directions but we also learned that technology can fail you in a surprising number of ways! Sometimes the destination was not in the Garmin and in very rural areas (like the Kansas farm roads) the Garmin was completely wrong. We reverted to the pre-printed Google Maps instructions a few times. In a pinch, we would also use the iPhone to look something up on Google Maps as we were driving. This was the least reliable method, however, since cell phone signals were often nonexistent on many sections of the highway.

Another great navigation tool is tripadvisor.com.  This website has traveler-provided reviews of hotels, restaurants and places of interest.  We used it to great effect in many of the small towns we visited.  Often we would drive into a relatively uninteresting town but thanks to a suggestion from tripadvisor, we were guided to great hole-in-the-wall sorts of places that we never would have discovered on our own.  I recommend you use it to look up your own hometown.  You might find something surprising, or, do us all a favor and add in your own recommendations!

I shared with you my car accident worksheet and tips for handling car accidents. Fortunately, we never needed this on our trip!

I shared some tips for organizing the car. On a long road trip in a car packed with stuff, you have to constantly give some thought to cleaning up the car. We tried to empty out all trash each time we filled up for gas and clean out each night. Some days we were more successful than others! One other good tip was that we also cleaned the windows at each gas stop. This is critical when you are trying to do photography on the road since sometimes it is not possible to roll down the windows.

I let you in on some of my car cleaning secrets to get a new car look. I will be using them this weekend to overhaul our minivan.

We also discussed MADD’s efforts to prevent drunk driving and encouraged U.S. readers to contact their Congressional representatives to support ignition interlocks for convicted drunk drivers. You may see this type of legislation coming to a state near you. It recently passed in New York and takes effect August 15.

Ruly Ruth discussed what your car says about you. There were some great comments on this post.

diadia wrote:

Too cool Grand Mama tools about in an 02 Dodge Stratus (now extinct) in a
deep true red 4-dr sedan. Eat your heart out. It’s paid for.

A paid for car boosts its cool factor by 10 in my book! Thanks for the reminder!

Mac wrote:

. . . Finally succumbed to the mini-van, Toyota Siena. Thank goodness for the commercials that attempt to instill coolness with their “swagger wagon” advertising. Every now and then, I just HAVE to drive a vehicle that doesn’t have carseat in it…and when that happens, I take Evan’s Prius out for a spin! For some reason or another, it makes me feel younger!

I love the honesty in this comment. Some people incorporate their cars into their persona–like a large fashion accessory. While it is fun to drive in a fun car, I don’t wrap myself up in my car all that much and see it primarily as just a way to get around.

Also, since we don’t watch a lot of TV, I had to look up the “swagger wagon” reference. While they are funny commercials, they perpetuate stereotypes that minivan families are completely dweeby, self-absorbed people and watching them made me feel worse about being a minivan driver! I resign myself to driving the most “uncool” car in the world.

Finally, there were a few important lessons I learned about the benefits of taking a long vacation once in a while. It requires a lot more work to go on a long vacation than a short weekend trip (both in terms of pre-trip preparation and post-trip cleanup) but getting away from your everyday surroundings for a long period and seeing something completely new on a day-to-day basis really frees up your mind. It challenges the patterns you have developed and invites you to look at the world in a new way. Upon returning from my vacation, I view my own home differently and have been re-energized to work on more organizational projects.

We found out our vacation limit on this trip. It is about 14 days (for travel where we are in a new city every day). After 14 days, we tend to want to come back to home base to recharge for a bit. If we had longer stops on our route where we got to stay in a city for more than one or two days we might have been able to extend further. I wonder how many people have ever discovered what their vacation limit is. Too often, we are cramming vacation into the meager holiday weekends and going to visit the same people and places over and over.

I was surprised to read several new stories about the realities of “post-vacation letdown.”  This one in Newsweek says that research suggests we are happiest anticipating a vacation but not necessarily on the vacation itself.  It is written by someone who clearly does not enjoy family vacations and gives a bit of a grouchy perspective.  Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal’s Juggle column reports that some families are opting not to travel as a pack but rather having dad take off with friends for a “mancation” and mom with her girlfriends for a girls weekend.

Also, getting out and traveling gives you better insight on the news you read. If you do nothing but sit in your own home and read the headlines, you can become easily depressed and worried that the world is a dangerous place and that we are all about to become financially destitute. Out on the road, experiencing the U.S. for ourselves, we gained a new confidence and faith in this country. It’s sheer size, the diversity of the people who live here, its farms, industry and the potential for opportunity are incredible! While it is somewhat amazing that we all manage to cohere as a nation given the differences between states, the American flag flies proudly in every state. It was very inspiring to see and we are fortunate indeed to live in such a nation.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend. Back on Monday when we start a new month and a new theme!