Are we there yet?

Over the last 10 months, my wife and I have been lucky to live in Sarajevo, Bosnia, with reduced work commitments. This allowed us to make many road-trips with our two kids who are four and two years old.

On each trip, without fail, we never made it more than 10 kilometers, without one of the following phrases being uttered:

1. Are we there yet?
2. When are we going to be there?
3. I want to go home!

The further we went from Sarajevo, the worse it got: tantrums, fights and tears featuring in just about every trip. It often drove us to the edges of sanity.

How about a three week, 2,500km road-trip then?

For our three week summer break, we decided to go on a 2,500km road trip through Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. We knew we needed to do something different in order to keep our sanity and make this an enjoyable and memorable experience for all four of us.

Why not just give them an iPad?

Somewhere along the line we decided not to use digital devices to entertain our kids when out and about, and we’ve stuck with that decision.

I’ll be honest, I have felt like throwing the iPad (and other hard objects) at them on many of our car trips, but have somehow resisted the urge. Despite the tantrums and the tears, the conversations that result from their questioning of the passing sights and scenery are priceless memories for us and invaluable learning experiences for them.

Making the road-trip fun for the kids

We decided to design and make little road-trip activity books for the kids, with the hope of having them preoccupied enough to make the long kilometers pass more quickly.

The books consisted of a number of activities:

1. Picture pages — most of the book was made up of pages with pictures of things we expected to see in the various places we visited. This included things like local food, notable buildings, local cars, brands etc. We gave the kids sticker sheets with little stars which they could stick on pictures of things they saw.

2. Map pages — we printed out some maps of the areas we’d be visiting and drew our rough path on them. We stuck these inside the books and as we went along, we explained to the kids where we were and where we were going. This allowed us to explain the concept of countries and cities (they still mix that up) and we talked about the neighbouring countries and cities we were passing by.

3. Blank pages — we made sure we left some blank pages in the books to allow them to draw things they saw. Sometimes we helped them draw, sometimes they drew completely unrelated things, but regardless, it kept them entertained.

So, did it work?

Well, it did — surprisingly well.

I half expected the books to be discarded part way through the trip, but the kids carried them around and used them in the car on almost every leg of the trip.

The books encouraged them to ask many questions about the sites we were seeing, which allowed us to engage in conversations with a purpose, rather than just figuring out a way to get them to behave in the car.

We often filled out the books during our stays in various towns and used them to show the kids what was coming up the following day and what they could expect to see. This gave us things to talk about as soon as we got into the car, which meant they had less opportunity to fight or get cranky.

Our son loved the pictures of various cars and motorbikes (Vespa Ape was his favourite) and would point them out as we drove. We included pictures of car symbols and he loved calling them out as we passed them on the road.

They both paid a lot of attention to the food photos (cakes especially) and we made a point of seeking out the local food we had pictures of. We talked about how different foods come from different regions and how the various foods were produced (including the tough conversation about where meat comes from).

Castle photos instigated endless conversations about princesses and ‘the olden times’ and questions about why we can’t be princesses.

Sounds too good to be true?

To be honest, there were still occasional fights and tantrums. I still occasionally wanted to throw a hard object at them. However, I can honestly say that the road-trip experience was completely different to our previous road-trips, and a hell of a lot better.

Rather than being periods of time between destinations, the driving parts of the trip became events themselves — events we looked forward to.