Long car trip with children

bylromarha

Lunar_Eclipse wrote: »

You are probably (hopefully) worrying about nothing. Really. My children are 9 and 10 now, but we took them on a 32 hour journey to New Zealand, for the first time, when they were 4 and 5. I too was dreading it, particularly because after the travelling, there's then the jetlag and timezone adjustment.

We took DS to NZ, aged 15 months.

Then did the whole campervan thing round the country for 3 weeks.

I guess that was how I learnt to do long trips with young kids! Very few toys you could take with you for amusement both on the plane and luggage.

Can you see a sheep? Another sheep? Another sheep?!

ailuro2

Flybe do internal flights, then hire a car once you're here....

Stop off en route at Alton Towers, stay overnight and make a day out of it 1/2 way up?

Bin the car DVD till the last hour, as there's nothing surer to bring on car sickness than looking at a fixed point in a car for 90 minutes at a time.
At least if you use it in the last hour you won't be smelling sick in the car for the next 8 hours...

Drive in the dark when DS will be sleeping?

Lunar_Eclipse

bylromarha wrote: »

We took DS to NZ, aged 15 months.

Wow, well done. 15 months was not a good age to travel with our children.

We took our eldest on a plane for the first time (to France) about two weeks after her first birthday. All she wanted to do was walk up and down the aisle of the plane. The delayed take off was a little unpleasant. I was so pleased the flight was about 90 minutes long and we only had the one child!

We had to change planes at Singapore and Melbourne on our first trip to Auckland. Once is definitely better than twice!

jackomdj

paddedjohn wrote: »

Aaawww you said that hours and hours ago,......i need a poo!

but that bit more at the end is a bit less now! Keep it in & I will pull over & do that holding under your knees thing at the side of the road! (back to the traffic & away from stinging nettles if you are lucky!) :rotfl::rotfl:

hitatotatus

One invented by my MIL (forever grateful!!) - THE QUIET GAME. Count to 3 and no-one is to speak!! First one to speak does a forfeit.

fozzeh

Simple solution: diazepam.






(Before the iration; it's a joke).

merlin68

We did colchester to glasgow in August in 10 hours and the kids slept right through. We left about 9 o'clock at night

i_wanna_save_money!

We drive to Scotland with two kids age 8 and 5. I dreaded it the first time, but it is not that bad. Little one has a sleep for a few hours, they might do some colouring or reading. I won a portable dvd player and take it on long journeys but it barely gets used. It will be fine...and mine kids can be right moaners when they want as well...just have a couple of stop offs to stretch their legs, or if you still worrying drive overnight when they would sleep all of the journey, or get the train and hubby can drive.

lucylucky

Given the current weather conditions I would add a lot more time for your journey.

Obviously it depends where you are actually travelling to (Scotland is quite big to get around).

A 4 hour journey last Sunday took 14 hours because of the snow and here in Glasgow it is snowing more heavily than I have seen for some time and even the major A roads are gridlocked.

At the time of posting both Glasgow and Edinburgh airports are closed.

Tulip09

My parents gave us cameras on our wonderful adventures (not allowed to call them long journeys), i had some lovely pictures of Scottish scenery and my brother had lots of Eddie Stobart trucks . We played games, eye spy, finding all the letters of the alphabet of license plates, discribing objects/people etc, spot the yellow car or made up stories using things we had seen. We always stopped in the middle for (junk food & sweets & comic) so that kept us busy for a few hours back in the car. For every hour of 'not whining' we earned 50p, and got paid it on the hour