Tomorrow as soon as the kids get out of school we’ll be off on another trip! We’re headed to Texas for several small group meetings and speaking at a church. We’d appreciate your prayers, as we don’t want this to just be a time that Cameron and I yap about ourselves, but a time that reminds others all the needs there are in this world and how God can use any of us. I mean if He can use me…believe me, He’s strong enough to use you!
And just for fun, here’s a few tips I’m learning as we traverse around the country with 2 kids.
- Activity bags for the kids. The kids got some really nice sturdy cloth bags for Christmas, which I’ve filled with a couple of altoid tin toys, books, action figures in containers, hand held games, drawing packs my sister made and 1 stuffed animal each.
- DVDs are wonderful. I’m not gonna lie, we’ve loved having a dvd player in the car for the kids. It’s especially nice when driving in the evenings and it’s too dark to read or play, but they’re not sleepy yet.
- Pizza=good trip meal. While we do usually eat out on trips, I like to bring at least one if not more meals with us, because even if we try to eat out cheaply, it’s still gonna cost us about $20. Sandwiches, burritos, wraps and pizza muffins are all great options, and another one that I like, which we’ll be doing this trip, is cold pizza! I bought 2 pizzas, that just need to be baked (I have a buy 1, get 1 free deal). I’ll bake them, cut them up, then toss in a cooler! Since pizza is a favorite in our family, it makes eating out less tempting! And the other big bonus to eating in the car, is that when you do stop, you can let the kids run and play the whole time, instead of just shoving them into a restaurant booth and saying, “Do some more sitting, while we’re out of the car!”.
- Pack kids outfits in Ziploc bags. I’ve seen this idea on pinterest and blogs a lot, but never got around to trying it until our last trip. It worked really well to easily find what to wear, the main problem is that my kids’ clothes are starting to get a little big for cramming into this size of bag…I might need to upgrade to plain ol’ grocery bags, that’s not as tidy looking, but would work fine.
- Have a hotel bag. This was Cameron’s idea….I guess he got tired of carrying 4 pieces of luggage into a hotel just for us all to grab one pair of jammies out of each, then haul them back out the next morning. Now we put all our pajamas, clothes and toiletries for one night into just one bag (having the kid’s clothes in Ziplocs makes this easy to do).
- Never pay full price for a hotel. We’ve used 2 methods to cut back on hotel rooms. One is to look for booklets with coupons for hotels, which can usually be found at travel centers. We’ve more recently started using hotwire. I can’t speak for others, but so far we’ve found our hotels satisfactory and the latest hotel was only $41 for all 4 of us!
- Don’t forget your clothes, particularly those on the hangars…you know the nice ones, for speaking in….not that we’d ever do something like that! 🙂
Great travel ideas! It may be worth investing in 2 gallon zip lock bags-they are out there and would work for the larger clothes! Have fun on your trip!