re: Traveling with little kids

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For car rides, they’re good for about 2.5-3 hours between stops

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I’m getting too old for this.

I stop every 1.5 to 2 hours max because of my back.

When we had small kids, we stopped every 2 hours or so.

Our kids are road trip warriors and have been since they were young. In the car, tablets and/or video screens on the headrests for movies. Just know, though, that you're going to end up with a kid whose crying in their car seat for long periods and just have to suck it up. It's just part of it. One trick we usually did was to leave either at night when they'd go to sleep or very very early in the morning (3-4am). We still do the early morning departures when we're road tripping if possible because everyone else sleeps while I drive and before first breakfast/coffee/gas fillup, you're 4 hours into the trip already while everyone else slept.

When ours were younger, we pretty much stuck to beach vacations (which was a 10 hour drive for us). The "rhythm" of a beach vacation works pretty well with young kids. I'd get up before dawn, go fish for a while, come back to breakfast with the family. Make the haul down to the beach and hang out for the morning. Back up to the house for lunch and maybe a swim if we had a pool. Then down for a nap for the kids. Then you can either take a nap if you need it or go have some adult time. Then back up, back ot the beach for later afternoon. Back up to house for dinner, and I'd usually go back down for sunset fishing. Put the kids down and hang out with the other adults after they're in bed.

My wife and I have always been pretty obsessive about our kids routines when they were young, though, so the thought of a busy tourist itinerary when they were young just didn't work for us. Once the boys got to 8-10 years old, then we started branching out in our travel and doing stuff that involved a much looser schedule.

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find a safe place and have them do sprints and various exercises to get the energy out of them.



I try to do that with my wife.

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Put up a sun shade in the windshield. Then tie a woobie to the oh shite handles to cover the side windows. "Exercise" in peace.