Tips for keeping kids engaged on long road trips?

They should be able to handle it.

We would go MS to CT when I was a kid and that was the 90s without technology.

diphenhydramine

Word games, like finding words that begin with each letter of the alphabet in order on road signs, etc. Here is a good list of word games for car trips: LINK
And good ol I Spy and 20 Questions.
Small sketchbook type journals and colored pencils (or watercolor pencils and a waterbrush), so that they can make a travel journal of sights along the way. Can paste in ticket stubs, etc from places you visit. Add a hand drawn map, write impressions....it will end up as a nice keepsake of the journey. If the kids have a Polaroid type camera, it’s easy to add sticker pics to the journal.

We did a combination of several things. The usual games such as I spy, the alphabet game, etc... we also had a scavenger hunt card game we got online somewhere that really killed time. It was a deck of cards and you would have to find things like a car with 3 people in it, or a man with a beard wearing sunglasses, etc... this kept the kids constantly scanning the landscape and we talked about all kinds of things we saw as a result. I also came up with a checklist of things for the kids to do where they would add up their score at the end and compete against each other. Some examples of things on the list were: take a picture in front of each state sign, take a picture in front of each national park sign, try _____ food (research local foods that an area is known for ahead of time. In our case cheese curds, Indian tacos, chislic, bison, and kuchen,). Fart in each state (6 year old boy loved this). Find a geocache in each state. Find local animals (bison, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep, antelope, mountain goats, elk, etc... in our case.) find a geocache in each state, swim in a lake, wade in a creek, and several other things. It was a very “dad” list and a lot of the stuff is corny, but the kids stayed engaged and we made memories that I feel we otherwise would’ve missed had my kids been watching movies with their headphones on.

Trivia pursuit has a family edition that’s great for road Trips (Just use the cards and scrap the board). 1/2 of the cards are for kids and 1/2 for adults. It always brings up good talking points about the questions.

Strap them kids
Give them a little bit a Benadryl
And a Cherry Coke
We’re going to Oklahoma
for the family reunion

Hungryone, I’m glad you posted this. Watching Ken Burns National parks there was a commentator on there, Dayton Duncan I think, that said his dad made them keep a daily diary when they visited the parks as a kid. At the time when I watched it I thought that would be a good idea and planned to do just that, but I forgot. Thanks for jogging my memory.

As far as don’t come back East, I’ve been lobbying to move west with my family for a while. They won’t have it. The three Fs keep them cemented here:
Friends
Family
Familiarity.