Vacation--Day One

I was a little worried about our vacation-- 12 hours of driving time was not a pleasant prospect. Our last long car trip was to Orlando with 3 kids--Orlando is 8 hours away and the return trip took us 13+ hours!

I got a lot of ideas from Shanna from her recent trip and I came up with a few of my own. Here is what I did:

Backpacks--Each of the kids got a backpack full of things for them to do. Each backpack had a 3 ring binder with notebooks and paper and a pencil case with either Crayons (Alex) or pens/pencils/colored pencils (Caroline and Carter).

• Caroline's backpack also held a bunch of new books for her to read, some word searches, mad libs, etc. Her MP3 player (with headphones), sunglasses, and a few printouts of travel games--like a list of all the license plates to mark off what ones we see, street signs, etc.
• Carter's backpack also held some pokemon books, a few drawing books, his mp3 player (I loaded a bunch of fun kids songs on them that they hadn't heard before--and they already had a lot of primary songs), sunglasses, and some bionicle toys that I had gotten from McDonalds a LONG time ago.
• Alex's backpack also held a bunch of coloring books, an extra notebook, and a few of the bionicles.

Electronics--this is where you may laugh (you won't be the first). We have a TV/DVD player in the van. We also have a portable DVD player that we sometimes use for Matt's car. The portable DVD player has two screens.

• We hooked the portable DVD player up in the car in addition to the one already installed in the van. We put one screen in front of Caroline and one for Carter. I bought headphones for all three kids. This allowed Caroline and Carter to watch one movie while Alex watched another movie
• We then took it a step further...Caroline and Carter both had self contained video games (you just plug them into the tv and you can play the game). With both tvs connecte, the kids could each play their game, or watch a movie, or one could watch the movie while the other played their game.
  
• Matt and I got books on CD from Cracker Barrel and listened to those in the front

So yes, we could all be in the car and not really have to interact--but when you are driving as much as we did (12+ hours each way, plus several 1-3 hour trips during the trip) it is nice to have some distance sometimes!

We did make them turn their tvs off at various times and they read and did other things from their backpacks. It really was great and we had very few problems with the drive!

Here is the car loaded up--it is sort of out of focus, so I think Caroline took this using Matt's camera. (We also packed really light and put some things in our car top carrier that we bought for the trip).
We would stop every couple of hours at a rest stop and let the kids run around, I would feed Aaron and we would all go to the bathroom.

Lake Hartwell rest stop in South Carolina

There were a ton of fish in the lake

The first day we left about 1 (by the time we actually got on the road) and stopped about 2 hours outside of Harrisburg, PA in the town of Winchester, VA at about Midnight.