Guess what? I just spent 34 hours (across three days) in a car with my three year old and… I lived to tell the tale! We actually did the drive twice and I can happily say it was not bad at all! And no, I haven’t blocked out any terrible memories or horrible meltdowns. It was truly an easy and pain-free experience.

Here’s a little background in case you haven’t been following along with the “On The Road” series. My husband and I bought a trailer so we could continue to safely have adventures during the pandemic. We planned on taking the trailer to Michigan this fall to spend time with my parents. We’re lucky to both have flexible schedules and the ability to work remotely so we figured why not do it from a beautiful place with far fewer people, easy access to the woods and the water and family, of course. Well, the trailer didn’t work out (you can read about it here) so we decided to power through in our car.

Since it was the first time we were leaving home post-covid I was definitely anxious but did a lot of research ahead of time. Here were some of the decisions I made before we left: we were going to pack our food so we didn’t have to buy any on the road (less potential exposure risk, less time lost on the road), we were going to go as fast as we could (we did the drive in three days) and we were going to stay at Hiltons for two nights based on my comfort level after speaking directly with the hotels (and their partnership with Lysol and full cleaning policy clearly listed on their website didn’t hurt either). With those two big decisions out of the way I was able to focus on the actual day-to-day logistics of being trapped in a car with kid for 10-12 hours a day.

Now that we’ve done the trip twice, I’ve learned some other good lessons about how to survive epic car trips. Here are the things that worked for us:

Make sure to prep your kid ahead of time - We made sure to tell our daughter several days in advance so she understood that for three days we were going to be in the car, for two nights we’d stay at hotels and at the end we would see Grandma and Grandpa. I really think this helped so much because she never got antsy and understood that the only thing we were doing each day was driving.
Start your driving days early - We got up at 5:30am, showered and packed our bags. There is nothing better than the sun coming up and knowing you’ve already knocked out a few hours of driving.
Bring cleaning supplies - Call me paranoid, but I don’t care how thoroughly someone says they cleaned the rooms, I still want to give it a good wipe down.
Speaking of cleaning, make a “survival kit” for the car that is easily accessible - We used a simple little container from Target and filled it with disposable silverware, toilet paper, paper towels, lysol wipes, hand sanitizer, extra clothes for our daughter, gloves if we needed them, extra masks, etc.
Bring a toddler potty - Not much more to say on that one!
Buy some new car toys and tell your kid about them - My daughter knew she was getting getting a couple little fun surprises at a few times each day on the road and it made the day feel more exciting for her. I made a full list of everything we purchased for our road trip, including all the toys we bought, and you can read that here. I will tell you the most exiting toys (that got the most use out of them) were the magnetic lunch box and the couple random things I picked up at CVS throughout the trip (like monster finger puppets and a squishy spider). But you can also encourage your kid to just look out the window, listen to music or even better, just talk to you. Our daughter told us stories as we drove, we played eye spy and road trip bingo and just enjoyed the simple things. It’s easy to feel like we need to provide endless entertainment for our kids but usually they just want to talk and hang out. We also bought a special new book (this Pixar movie map book) and a new game to play when we got to the hotels at night so we could all wind down.
Pack snacks. Lots and lots (and lots and lots) of snacks. Toddlers can somehow eat continuously for hours.
Embrace the lack of routine and throw rules out the window. Some days our daughter watched our iPad for hours and it was okay, her brain didn’t turn into mush and she didn’t demand the iPad once out of the car. We also went to bed late, got up early and generally ignored all normal sleep patterns.
Enjoy the scenery along the way and make a few fun stops. We visited the Petrified Forest on the way there which was amazing and then we also did other “silly” things to keep our daughter happy like walk across a bridge overpass over and over again so she felt like she had some say in our adventuring.
Pack good food! We filled our Yeti with ingredients for cheese plates, we made delicious sandwiches, basically we brought fun and special food. When we did stop to eat it felt way more enjoyable than a drive-thru burger and gave us a chance to find a table (generally the tables at rest stops were totally empty and clean) and have a leisurely meal.