The Road Trip

All of these photos were taken on an iPhone. If you want to find me, I’m on instagram as TabithaBlue.

We just returned home from our quick and epic road trip to Michigan! Quick because it was just a week long, including the 1200 mile drive time there and back to Florida. And Epic because we packed a van load of items after cleaning out our rooms and closets and collecting goods from friends to help fill a crate with clothes, toys, tools and plenty of other household items to send to Honduras for an orphanage/school that we work with there. So after the van was packed and loaded from floor to ceiling, we ended up filling every spare crevice with our own luggage, and then squishing ourselves in between.

It was fun and tiring, amazing and crazy, fulfilling and adventurous. Though our preferred method of travel is the get-er-done airplane, there is just something exciting about road trips. We had planned on a family road trip soon, a long and adventurous span of pavement with many stops through our favorite states and a fun cabin stay in Michigan, and we still may, but this straight-20-hour-drive that arose for us to embrace still called for a well planned load of goods to keep the kids entertained and the parents sane.

A little peek inside our bag of tricks would reveal some of these road trip essentials:

These magnetic chalkboard trays were a hit! We just bought cheap baking sheets from the dollar store and spray painted with my favorite… chalkboard paint. To help with keeping them from tipping while driving, Chris made a slit in each side of the tray and then we used loops of velcro to loosely attach the tray to the armrests. Voila! A cleanable surface for everything from eating while on the go, coloring with chalk, playing with toys, using as a table for coloring pages and worksheets, or for actual magnetic play (we had a magnetic little people family as well as all 50 states that would stick right on the tray, and a magnetic clip also helped in keeping loose paper attached while writing).

Aliyah made her own Road Trip Journal! We used card stock sheets and cut them down to size and then use three rings to hold the sheets together. We then took with us a hole punch and glue stick to add souvenirs from the trip, like postcards, and of course crayons and colored pencils so she could write and draw her story.

This is a fun Road Trip Scavenger Hunt that we made and the kids loved! We added some pictures so that the wee one could know which boxes to check and could help keep track of what we needed to find. Everyone had their own sheet, but we worked through the items together, instead of as a contest… and by the time we pulled back home in our driveway, all the items were crossed off the list! Feel free to download here.

So yeah, it was fun. And now we’re home enjoying the Florida sunshine once again, well, and then I leave in the morning for Boston (this time flying). I’m not ready to go back to the cold quite yet, but I’m sure going to make the best of it.

If you’ll excuse me, I have some un-packing and some re-packing to do.

xo