Road Trip Games for Kids and Adults

My kids love the alphabet game - no supplies required. You just try to finish the entire alphabet finding words from road signs and billboards that start with each letter, in order (we sometimes skip Q if we're really stuck).

Another one my kids like is a book of Mad Libs. You can find them at the dollar store sometimes.

K.

This past month we have traveled from Washington, DC to:

* Niagra Falls - Canada side (10 hours one way)
* Boston, MA (8 hours) - actually broken down to two days - stopped in Connecticut for some sight seeing.
* Gettysburg, MD (1.5 hours)
* Philadelphia, PA (3 hours)
* South New Jersey (4 hours)

All of this without ANY DVDs!!! What did we do?

License plate find - my kids are 13 and 15. We got the COMPLETE Eastern Seabord of the US in license plates! YAHOO!! And to surprise us - even Hawaii !!!!

We see who can complete the alphabet first from road signs.

We had the boys READ and NAVIGATE the map - so they don't just rely on a GPS to get somewhere.

Trivia is fun too. We have "Meet the Presidents" which is a trivia game. Cards of each president and a factoid or something about them...one side is the question, the other is the answer.

We also love "Brain Games" trivia.

I think Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader has a trivia game out there too for cars!

Have a blast! Safe travels!!

With 4 boys, Tyler and I struggle to keep it fun in the car!

We drove from California to Georgia when we moved here. The boys were younger, but we did a lot of talking, card playing (yes, it's possible) and trivia.

The license plate game is fun. Interesting to see how many people are traveling and from where and each state has several different plates so you need to pay attention!

We stopped at Visitors Centers to pick up maps and information. It was a nice break and most visitors centers can give you helpful information about the area. When we made this trek, we had AAA do the map for us and they gave us variables/detours. We didn't just drive across the US, we stopped places and did some sight-seeing. We took about two weeks, Texas is huge and decided to break that one up. We saw the Alamo and Boardwalk.

There is a magnetic checkers game you can get and Scrabble too.

When we did a big road trip a couple of years ago I found some road side bingo cards that has plastic windows you could close. There were a couple of different ones. My kids still pull them out sometimes.

The Would You Rather games are great fun. The cards ask questions like, "Would you rather eat fried bugs or a raw egg?" We also found some cards in the dollar section at Target not long ago that were called That's a God Question. They have questions like, "If you could change your name what would it be and why?" I've also seen other sets of cards that are similar.

We always played the license plate game and tried to find license plates from all 50 states and as many Canadian provinces as possible. We are considering buying a Melissa and Doug wooden map that we found. It has a license plate for each state and you can flip it over to show which states you have found.

We also play the alphabet game two different ways. One is to find every letter in ABC order on roadside signs. The other one is to find something that starts with each letter in ABC order. We also play I Spy.

Get a map that covers the area you are traveling. You can highlight the route ahead of time. But, I just did an short 1-1/2 hour road trip with my kids and my niece and nephew. They spent all but the last 20 minutes of the trip trying to find the roads we were on and the towns and state parks that we were driving through. They had a great time and with GPS I think fewer people take time to look at maps.

You can also pick up travel guides from the library and your kids can find things that you can stop and see. We just got back from Kentucky and my almost 6 year old checked out some kids' books from the library about Kentucky and told us lots of little tidbits he was learning as he read it in the car.

If you can find a book on CD that everyone would enjoy they are great to have too. I remember long before cars even had standard cassette tape players, my mom recorded herself reading some of our favorite picture books. My brother and I had the books and a battery operated tape player in the back seat and listened to tons of books!

We also pack some of our favorite music CDs and do a lot of singing!

Darn.. I had the entire question typed out, and for some reason, I hit the back arrow instead of post! Too early in the morning, I guess....

Here are some things we've done to keep busy on road trips...

Collect license plates.... write down all the different state license plates you see on the trip. Heck, I still do that, and I'm 58!

Alphabet game.... several variations, either finding the letters on the signs, or finding actual objects that start with the letter.

Road Trip bingo...I remember those from trips long ago! You can order them online...... http://www.amazon.com/Travel-Roadtrip-Vacation-Family-Col...

Mad lib stories is also a lot of fun.

Have fun on your trip!

You guys into sudoku? You could add that to the mix. You would need clipboards.

We had the same bingo boards as Erica - with the plastic windows that slide closed. They were great because there were no pieces/tokens to drop or lose or have sliding around when the car hit a bump.

A friend of mine gets a lot of games on line (google "free car bingo" or "free travel games") and then laminates them at her local printer. Her kids use dry erase markers that wipe off. Your kids have to be old enough to not get market on the seats, but you can also throw an old bed sheet over the seats for protection against markers and food.

You can also find the license plate lists where you cross off the states, but if you printed a map of the US and laminated it, the kids could actually learn some geography by finding the states. You could use markers, again, but I think you could also use the dot labels - get the garage sale removable labels, not the regular ones. There's a little more waste but a lot less marker mess.

My kid had a little tray table thing that hooked into the slot between the door and the window - as on airplanes, he used it as a "work" table as well as a snack table.

Do you have an organizer that hooks on the back of the front seats? They have slots and pockets similar to closet shoe organizers. Great for keeping things visible and neat.

We also love the big variety puzzle books you can find at any bookstore or magazine area of a supermarket - they have every type of puzzle so they are great for people who are good at different things.

I think a great resource is the public library. I have found some wonderful "old fashioned" games in books written in the 1950s and 1960s, before anyone had CD players and DVD units and smart phones, and there were only ever 2 radio stations in the area you were traveling through. There are great suggestions for things that will fascinate the kids - for the precise reason that they have never played them!

I like the suggestion below to do Mad Libs - they have been around for 50 years and are still a riot. And kids even learn what a "noun" and an "adverb" are - another bonus.

Just got back from my road trip so I hope this gets to you in time.

I go to a website called moms minivan.

It has printable templates for bingo, battleship, license plate game and more.

I also found a template for hangman.

Pick a classic (according to age, of course) and use this time to read it outloud!

Is it Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn time...or whatever book you think you'd all like!