EP 42: Traveling with Children

Over the years, our family has found ways to make traveling with children more enjoyable, economical, educational, and easy. Listen to this week’s podcast for a treasure trove of tips you can use on your next family vacation. 

Traveling with Children

[Transcript from Episode 42]

Are you looking for ways to strengthen your marriage? Would you like to raise children you enjoy being around? Do you long for a peaceful, orderly home that’s a blessing to everyone who comes through its doors? Then you’ve come to the right place. I’m Jennifer Flanders, a Bible-believing, homeschooling mother to 12, and host of the Loving Life at Home podcast. Join me as we discover what God’s Word has to say about marriage, motherhood, and minding the things that matter most.

Hello friend, welcome to Episode 42 of Loving Life at Home. Today’s topic is traveling with children. Lord willing, by the time this episode goes live on April 29th, our family will be in the middle of a two-and-a-half week road trip.

We’ll be traveling with several of the kids that are still living at home, plus three of the grandchildren and my mother, and we’ll be going up through Oklahoma and Kansas, North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, and visiting several state parks, five different capital city buildings, and lots of museums, a couple of other things that I’ll tell you more about in just a little bit.

But since travel is on my brain right now as I prepare for this trip, I thought now would be a great time to discuss how to make traveling with children more enjoyable and economical. So let’s delve right in.

What I Love about Traveling with Kids

Some of the things I love the most about traveling with my children and traveling as a family is, number one, the shared memories that we make.

1. Shared Memories

After we’ve visited a place together, then any time that location comes up in conversation or in a book we’re reading or the news or a movie we’re watching, we all have that experience that we’ve lived through together as a frame of reference. And while you don’t have to travel to make deposits in that bank of shared memories that you have with your family, it is an easy way to do it. And because it’s out of the ordinary, those memories tend to stick a little bit more than the day in day out things.

So that’s one of the reasons I love traveling with the kids. The second is family bonding and togetherness.

2. Family Bonding & Togetherness

When you work together to get through something on a trip, it really draws you closer together or hopefully it will draw you closer together.

And sometimes even the most harrowing experiences that were stressful in the moment become things that you laugh about in later years and just will never forget. Like the time that we were in Germany, I think we were in Frankfurt, and riding on a trolley that was unmanned. It was an automatic trolley and the kids all got off the trolley.

And my husband and I were following with two sleeping babies. He was carrying the three-year-old and I was carrying the one-year-old. And the door to the trolley snapped shut and whisked us away, leaving our seven other children standing on the street corner in Germany, wondering what in the world just happened.

And so that was kind of stressful in the moment. Fortunately, we were on a trolley that deposited us about four blocks down the road instead of on the channel or something that took us to another city, a bullet train. So it all worked out and my oldest son had just had everybody line up and wait for us.

We had had a rule at the time that if we got separated, that whoever was with dad would search and whoever was not with dad would wait until they were found. And so after we got separated, that one time we made a revision, which was anytime we were getting on or off a boat or a train or a trolley or a plane, we always had one parent go first, followed with all the other children, and then the other parent would bring up the rear. That way, if our party got split up like it happened in Frankfurt, then there would be a parent with both groups.

And later, the same thing happened in London, where mom and all the kids made it onto the train, onto the subway, but dad didn’t. And so once we got to the next stop, we just got off and waited until dad pulled up to that stop behind us 15 minutes later and popped off of his subway.

So those family bonding and togetherness, of course, you don’t have to have bad things happen on vacation to really bond as a family. There’s just lots of unique experiences and opportunities to do that when you’re traveling.

3. Expanded Horizons & Cultural Experiences

Then also, number three, it is a great way to expand your horizons and cultural experiences and just see other parts of the world or of the country and how people live in different climates and different cultures.

4. Peace of Mind

When we were planning that very first trip to Europe, this was before the Internet [was so firmly established]. And so I wasn’t able to just get online and make reservations and research what we wanted to do. I had to buy travel books.

And so I had a lot of travel guides that I had purchased to figure out where we should go while we were in Europe. We were going to spend 20, 21 days in Europe. We had gotten free airline tickets through frequent flyer miles. I’ll touch on that in a little bit. And I was trying to plan the most economical trip that I could for our family.

We had nine children at that time. So we took them all with us. But when I was researching and reading the books, one of the books had a question and answer section in it. And the question was, where is the best place to take your children in Europe? And the answer the author had given was “to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on the way to the airport,” which just made me so sad because I would have spent that whole three weeks worrying about my parents and how they were holding up, trying to keep up with nine children, that I really would not have enjoyed it nearly as much as just taking them with us.

And we would have missed out on all those family bonding experiences that I was just talking about, too, and the exposure to other cultures. So I like the peace of mind of knowing my kids are right there with me, and I know what they’re up to and can provide direction and training and share all these experiences with them.

Travel Perks for Homeschoolers

Then as a homeschool family, there are even more advantages, additional advantages that we enjoy when we travel as a family.

1. Flexible Schedules

One is flexible schedules. We’re not on a school schedule and so we can travel off season, which means that we don’t have to fight seasonal crowds and we don’t have to pay high season pricing, which has been great. A lot of times we are the only people on the tours that we take of museums and have the docent all to ourselves and can ask questions to our heart’s content. And they’re unrushed and able to answer all of our questions and seem to really appreciate our asking them.

So off-season travel is awesome if you’re able to do it, if your children are young, or if you happen to homeschool like we do.

2. Homeschooling Discounts

And then also homeschool discounts. We have 12 children and so we qualify for group discounts a lot of times. But even if you don’t have that many kids, you can still save money as a homeschooler.

I remember the first time we went to Williamsburg, they had a program where if you just showed your homeschool support group card (or for us it was the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, HSLDA, I’ll link that in the show notes) — I’d show that card and get a discount.

Now I think that Williamsburg only gives discounts certain months of the year to homeschoolers, like September, maybe October. But last time we were there we went to Yorktown instead of to Williamsburg and with the homeschool discount that we were offered at Yorktown, we were able to get our entire family in to that museum and living history site for not much more than it would have cost for one ticket to Williamsburg.

So be sure to check out those homeschool discounts because they are substantial a lot of times.

Any Excuse to Travel

Then I’d also like to talk about optimizing opportunities. Make your family travel a priority and it doesn’t just have to take the form of a summer vacation.

1. Employment

Think through what is your excuse to travel. It might be your job. Whenever possible, combine business with pleasure.

For many years my husband had to, well he still has to take a CME, he’s a physician and he has to take continuing medical education. But he used to also be in the Army Medical Reserves and so he would have to drill two weeks a year in the summer but also one weekend a month. Okay, well there wasn’t much we could do about the summer drill but because he was a physician, any CME that he took would count against his one week in the month.

And while he couldn’t very easily take two, three, four kids with him to the Army base to drill, but he could take us with him when he went to do the CME weekend. So he ended up doing basically a CME weekend every month of the year, just local. We’d go down to Houston or over to Dallas or San Antonio and he would be in class for the early morning and early afternoon.

But then the rest of the time he was available to spend with us and so it was an inexpensive way because we could all fit in one hotel. It wasn’t any added expense to take us with him and then we were all going to be eating anyway and we found economical ways to do that, which I’ll describe in a little bit here to you also. So if it’s possible to travel together when one or both of you have work trips, then that’s a great way to incorporate your children in your travel.

2. Education

Another thing to think about is your education. Turn your vacation into an extended field trip or vice versa. If you’re making a field trip to a city or town that’s an hour or two away, consider just staying over and seeing everything you can in addition to maybe the one museum that you are planning to attend.

Just make it an extended field trip. And likewise, when you are traveling, make your family vacations as educational as you can. We love adding things on like museum trips and factory tours and that sort of thing when we’re traveling.

And whenever I plot our destination and the route that we’re going to take to reach it, I look along the route for museums that we could stop at on our way and factories and state capitals and stuff like that.

3. Evangelism

Then evangelism is another opportunity for travel. Mission-minded families can work side by side as they share the gospel or build houses or dig wells or whatever the case may be.

My husband took a trip with Mercy Ships for a short-term junket to Guatemala many years ago when our two oldest were just maybe 10 and 12. And he took those children along with him and they got to work side by side with him and visit with patients in the clinic as they were waiting for surgery.

4. Experience

And that was a wonderful shared experience, a bonding experience and exposure to other cultures and a learning experience.

5. Escape

Then also escape. You don’t have to go far to get away. Sometimes you just need a break from the day to day and a staycation can accomplish that sometimes or just traveling to the nearest big city and doing some of the things that are available there.

I know I mentioned a few weeks back about reading an article that indicated the expensive weddings do not make happier marriages. In fact, that study found that marriage longevity was inversely proportional to the amount spent on the wedding ceremony. The more you spent, the less likely it was that your relationship would last.

Well, I think the same principle applies to travel as well. It’s not always directly proportional, the amount of money you spend and the quality of memories you make. It’s possible to have a fun and memorable family vacation without breaking the bank.

You don’t have to spend a fortune or take out a second mortgage to have these kind of experiences I’m talking about. In fact, at this point, our family has traveled all over the globe. But several years ago, I asked our kids what their most memorable family vacation was and you know what they answered? Almost without exception, they loved the time that we spent in San Antonio and El Paso, which is about 12 hours from our home here in East Texas.

But my husband was at the time in the Army Medical Reserves. And that means whenever they call up the full time Army docs and send them overseas during a wartime effort, they backfill the hospitals in the states with medical reservists. And so my husband was activated and called to El Paso to take care of the soldiers there while the full time docs had been deployed overseas.

So we ended up going with them. The homeschool schedules allowed us to just travel as a family, even though he was going to be there four months. But he was there for four months, they put him in a bachelor barracks that was 500 square feet.

And at that time, we had 10 children. And all 12 of us squeezed in surreptitiously to that bachelor barracks, he had the room to himself, but the kitchen he had to share with a soldier on the other side of the complex, almost like a duplex. We both had separate living arrangements, but we shared a kitchen in common.

And so all 12 of us spent four months in that little 500-square foot apartment. It was not glamorous whatsoever. The bathroom was tiny, and it had the only three pronged outlet in the apartment. And so we had to keep our computer plugged into that outlet.

And when the shower was so small, you could almost just squirt soap on the wall and spin in a circle and get clean. But you’d have to squeeze by the shower to get over to the toilet. But you could sit on the toilet, brush your teeth, spit in the sink and check your email all at once because it was so cram-packed in there.

But wonderful memories. It was almost like a paid vacation. My husband got a stipend for being there, not what he would have earned in private practice, but it was stipend work.

And then they would send him home at three or four every day, which was a much lighter schedule than we were accustomed to back home. And so three or four every day, and he didn’t have to work the weekends. And so we were able to spend so much time together as a family while he was deployed.

And we would read books together and explore the surrounding towns in West Texas and New Mexico, and just created so many wonderful memories. And it didn’t cost much at all for the experience.

But my kids still, the ones that were born and remember it, still rank it as some of their fondest vacation memories, even though it wasn’t really a vacation.

Finding Frugal Family Fun

So how do we go about finding family fun, and especially inexpensive family fun? Well, some of the things that I do when I’m planning a vacation is wherever we’re going, I check several sites.

1. Check Public Parks and Libraries

One, I will look up the Parks and Recreation Department and the libraries in town. A lot of times libraries will have story times and classes and movies. Sometimes they’ll have craft and maker spaces or lectures.

And so a lot of times, especially when our children were younger and we would travel, we would go to story times, movies, take advantage of some of those great programs that were normally free at the library, at the local library, wherever we were visiting. So that’s one spot I look. Then also the Parks and Recreation Department, a lot of times they’ll have outdoor movies.

2. Consult Events Calendars

You can find this on the city calendars too. Wherever you’re going, look at the Chamber of Commerce for that town. On their website, there should be a calendar of events.

And you can a lot of times find free classes at the Parks and Recs Department or movies in the park or even symphonies in the park. We’ve done Symphony Under the Stars and seen theater and ballet and outdoor amphitheaters. And they have historical reenactments and festivals at times.

We’ve done lots of Texas history historical reenactments or Civil War reenactments and enjoyed watching those. Also there’s craft fairs and cooking classes, a really a wide variety of things. So if you just would look at that events calendar for wherever you’re going or if you’re staying, look at your own town’s events calendar and see if there are some things that you can take advantage of that way.

One of the special events that we usually do here in Texas is go to the State Fair. I grew up in Dallas and so the State Fair of Texas is in Dallas. And all the school children always got a day off to attend the fair and free tickets.

And so the parents just had to pay for their own tickets. Well, when we moved to Tyler, I found out that they make that same offer for homeschoolers. And so I got on their mailing list and once a year when it’s time to request the tickets, they send me a reminder and I go online and request tickets for all my school-aged children and or my grandchildren.

And we still go to the fair every year for free except for parent tickets. Then also check museums. A lot of times the museums in a city will have free nights and so check their websites for free admission nights or join a museum that has reciprocal benefits.

3. Look for Free Days at Area Museums

We are a member of a museum that has reciprocal benefits not only to other children’s museums and science museums but also to time traveler museums. So there’s some history museums that are included in that and they’re on maybe four or five different reciprocal benefit membership lists. So it really gives us a lot of bang for our buck and I always join and travel with that card so that we can get in to museums as we travel and historical sites that we might otherwise have to pay tickets for.

4. Check for Free Zoos or Botanical Gardens

Then zoos and gardens and arboretums are also great sites to see on a road trip along the way or at the destination wherever you’re staying for the bulk of your trip. I’ll provide a link in the show notes of a place where you can look up state-by-state where the gardens are the arboretums and a lot of those are free to everybody and then others are free just to people who have joined their local arboretum. We’re members of the Dallas Arboretum so we travel to Dallas several times since my mom lives in Dallas.

We travel several times a year and go to the Arboretum take her to the Arboretum and we just got back a couple of weeks ago from seeing their spring blooms. We didn’t make it quite in time for the tulips. They’re always so gorgeous but we missed the tulips but still the pansies and other bulbs were up and just beautiful beautiful grounds and the azaleas were still in bloom and some dogwoods.

Anyway arboretums are fun and the zoos there are lots of zoos across the country that are still free. The one here in Tyler used to be free. It’s no longer free.

We join it so that we can go anytime we want and that membership gives us half price admission to other zoos that are on that same reciprocal benefits list but you can check that out too.

5. Visit National Parks

Then National Parks this vacation that we the road trip that we’re currently taking we’re gonna be stopping at I think five or six National Parks. Now some National Parks are free year-round and that’s great but a lot of them have an entry fee at least for your vehicle but if you’re gonna go to a bunch of them in a single year I would recommend getting a membership so that you can just get free entrance to all the different National Parks.

If you’re only going to one or two then you might consider going on their free days. The National Parks are open for free every year on Martin Luther King Day. Also on April 21st I think that’s the start of National Parks Week and then in September the last part of September and then also Veterans Day November 11th you can get in for free at any of the National Parks.

Then another way that you can get in is if you happen to have a fourth grader they have a special program called Every Kid in a Park and you just have to go online and answer three really super easy questions like you know of these three destinations where would you most like to visit and that sort of thing those those kind of questions there’s not a right or wrong answer but your child answers these three questions and then you can print out a certificate that lets the child plus all of his family members in for free for a full year.

At the first one you visit they’ll exchange the little printout that you got off the computer for a regular parks card and you can use that for the rest of your visits that year. And then also if you have children and you do go to these National Parks most of them have a junior ranger program where your kids can earn free badges or sometimes even sew on patches for completing educational activities at each park.

So when you get to the park if you’ll just go to the front desk and ask about their junior ranger program they’ll usually just give you a little booklet for each child and they’re full of fun little activities things to look for in the museum maybe scavenger hunts for the grounds you know one page where they draw like a picture of an animal they saw at the park or work a crossword or do a word find that sort of thing. Anyway… pretty easy activities, but they do learn something and then they get those free little badges which are a great and inexpensive thing to collect if you want a souvenir from your trip then that’s a great way to go about it especially if you have a bunch of kids to have free souvenirs that they earned by learning stuff. So check that out too.

6. Take a Factory Tour

And then another thing that we really love to do is US Factory Tours. I think I’ve mentioned this in my segment on San Antonio and the things that we do when we’re in San Antonio but we’ve gone all across the states if you go to www.factorytoursusa.com and I will link that in the show notes you can search by states for the different factories that are open for tours and our family has enjoyed that so much. We’ve toured guitar factories and shoe factories, granite quarry, we toured a gold mine and chocolatier, an animatronics company that was really fascinating it was free and lots of candy stores, an orange grove and some water treatment plants.

When we were in Aspen I know most people go up to Aspen to ski and we went up to Aspen and toured their water treatment facility which was really fascinating because they clean their water, the city water, sewage water, they clean it through all natural means using anaerobic and aerobic bacteria in two different stages and then using UV light and filters and spin it off to get the bacteria back out and reuse it for the next batch of water that comes through and then they pass it through a UV light so that anything that was still left in it would be sterilized. The UV light sterilizes it so you don’t get a bloom of some kind of bacteria that had been used to clean the water and then they dump it back in their streams which are so pristine and clear water it just is amazing. So that whole process was multi-step and really the head room where the sewage water is first coming in was pretty rank but once you got away from that into the big pools of water that were being treated by the bacteria, the smell was not bad and it was just very interesting to see how they take nasty water and make it so crystal clear again.

So that is not considered necessarily a factory so you won’t find it on that factory tour website but do keep in mind that there’s things like concrete plants and water treatment plants and those sort of services that you can also tour. Service is not so much manufacturing. The factory tour website is mainly manufacturing.

You can go see how guitars are made or potato chips are made or that sort of thing but with the other kinds of tours that we’ve taken, they’re service based tours like treating your water or maybe forensics. We’ve done forensics tours at the police station and that sort of thing. Then next I want to talk to you about planning ahead and how we even go about plotting a big two and a half week road trip like we’re on right now.

Planning Your Next Trip

First of all, you got to consider time constraints because I know that not everybody has two and a half weeks to spend on a single trip and so whatever time that you’re allotted that you want to spend on this trip, you’ve got to work within that bounds, right? So if you have three days, you work within the three day limit and if you have three weeks, then you have more time to pack in more things.

So consider your time constraints, then count the costs. You’re going to have to compute gas and lodging and food and that sort of thing. Now the food you’re going to have to eat whether you’re away or at home anyway, so that shouldn’t be as big a factor as the gas and the lodging.

But I recommend brainstorming with kids. When we are planning trips, especially to a place that we’ve been before, a lot of times I’ll just make a list of all the different things we’ve done in the past and pass it out to the kids and have them rank one, two or three how interested they are in doing each of those activities again.

And then I just compile it and the ones that get the most points we do. But then I also try to make sure that each child gets at least one of the things that they ranked the highest. So if we have eight kids and we end up with four activities that we’re going to do the week that we’re in hot springs say, then I will just make sure that for each of the children, one of their highest ranked activities is on the list of things we do.

And if not, then I will make adjustments accordingly and add that in, at least for that [particular] child. For instance, one year we were going to Hot Springs [in Arkansas]. Hot Springs is about four hours from Dallas.

So when my husband was in school and he didn’t have any time off, no summer breaks, no vacation to speak of, all that he got was a long weekend on Memorial Day weekend and another one on Labor Day weekend. Then when that was our schedule, about as far as we would go from home was hot springs. And we would just spend a couple of long weekends a year in hot springs because there was a lot of things that we could do there.

And I’ll tell you more about them in just a minute. But we would brainstorm with the kids and we would account for their needs and interests when I was making our itinerary and allow for rest stops. Four hours, we can make the four hours in a single push.

But if we’re driving, you know, to the Pacific Northwest, we’re going to take several days to get there and stop several times a day along the road. So as we do that, I would look for free fun along the way, including those museums and factory tours and state capitals. That’s another thing we’d love to do is go to state capitals.

They’re always free and very fascinating, lots of history. And you can collect capital stamps, which I’ve made little booklets for my kids to collect all the capital stamps in. So by the end of this trip, I think we’ll have 30 of those capital stamps.

But when we were going to Hot Springs — there was lots of things that we could do in Hot Springs. We were on a shoestring budget while my husband was in school. And like I said, the maximum amount of time that we ever had was a long weekend, just three days.

So we would drive up from Dallas. At that time, he was still in the reserves. So we got a great military discount for the hotel. It was almost a third of the price of the rack room rate. Sadly, it’s no longer open, and he’s no longer in the reserves, but it was great while it lasted. So military discount for the hotel and then lots of free fun.

In Hot Springs, there’s a whole Central Avenue that’s lined with old bath houses. And you can tour those old bath houses. That used to be the big attraction at Hot Springs because they do have natural hot springs and people would come for health reasons and go to these spas that were all along Central Avenue. But you can still go in and look at some of these beautiful, ornate, old buildings for free.

And then also hike Hot Springs National Park. And that’s one of the national parks that does not have an admission and you can hike along. You can see the springs and the wells and hike all the way up to the top. And then they do have a junior ranger program there so your kids can earn badges.

There’s lots of great window shopping, antique stores and craft stores and specialty shops along Central Avenue that we enjoyed. And then there’s a little station downtown where you can get hot water and people will just bring their big jugs and get this hot spring water and take it home and use it to drink at home. Let it cool off and have water, free water, from the natural springs there.

But what we like to do is bring tea bags with us and cups and we’ll just fill up our cups with that hot water from the springs, and it’s just like in a faucet. So you just go and you fill up your little cup from the faucet and then dip your tea bag in it. It’s hot enough to steep the tea, and that’s a great free — or almost free — activity that we enjoy doing when we’re in a Hot Springs.

Also there’s a great science museum there, the Mid-America Science Museum that we can get in free with our science museum [membership from home].

There’s also Garvin Woodland Gardens. It is a gorgeous botanical garden there in Hot Springs or right on the edge of it. And there is a fee to get into it, but it does honor our Dallas Arboretum Pass. And so if you happen to be a member of an arboretum or a botanical garden in your area then you could probably do the same thing and visit Garvin Woodland Gardens for free while you’re there.

So those are just some of the things that we did. I remember one year when I gave the kids the little questionnaire to figure out what we were going to do. One of the things we enjoy doing in Hot Springs is pontoon sailing. You used to be able to do that right there on the lake in town but the last time we went they said no more jet skis, no more pontoons, no parasailing, none of that. They have lots of beautiful homes along that lake and I’m sure that the owners did not appreciate tourists disturbing their peace with all the jet skis and the carrying on.

So we have to go to, I think, Lake Catherine — that is pretty close to Hot Springs — if we want to go boating. But you can rent a pontoon for an hour or two and truck along in the water, or you can get a faster boat and pull tubes behind you. So some of our kids really really love going tubing on the lake, and so even though that’s not a free thing that we can do there, it’s not that expensive especially with as many people that are enjoying it as we have.

And so that was important to some of the kids, so we made sure those kids at least got to do the tubing. And then one of our sons really wanted to see a magic show. They do have lots of shows in Hot Springs and one of the shows that’s very common was Maxwell Blade. He was a magician.

So the first time any of us ever saw him, we didn’t feel like we could afford tickets for the whole family and it was just really one son that ranked that very high on his list. And so my husband and he went to see that show after the younger children were in bed, and I stayed at the hotel with the younger children.

So that’s what I mean by making sure that each got to do something that was important to them.

We had a couple of girls that loved a horseback ride and so we made sure that we did some horseback riding at least with those children. Sometimes if you know the boys wanted to jet ski and the girls wanted to shop the downtown. So we’d split up for an hour or two so that each got to do what was important to them and then meet back up in time to eat lunch together or dinner together.

Feeding the Troops while Vacationing

[Which brings us to:] Feeding the troops. That’s another big thing about traveling is you do have to eat while you’re traveling, and sometimes that can be very expensive. But there are some dining options that can keep those costs down.

1. Pack a Picnic

We almost always pack food with us when we are first starting out on the trip so that we have at least snacks in the car that we don’t have to buy snacks at the gas station or grocery store stop at fast food restaurants straight off the bat. We can just pass out snacks there. Also once we get to wherever we’re going we will shop for groceries.

2. Take Advantage of Free Breakfasts

A lot of times we’re staying in accommodations that have a full kitchen on the premises and so we will eat breakfast in the hotel. If it’s a hotel that provides free breakfast, that’s great. But if not, then we just keep cereal and milk or oatmeal or eggs and bacon whatever we want to make in the room and cook it in the little kitchen there.

3. Bring a Crock Pot

And then I’ll usually start a crockpot meal before we set out for the day and that way we’ll have one meal out during lunch. We’ll eat a big meal at a restaurant and then when we get back to the room in the evening our crockpot dinner is all ready and we can eat that before going to bed.

Also with bringing a crockpot we had a van that or we we still have a van that has a three-prong plug in the front seat and so I have even made little hot ham and cheese sandwiches. Just wrap your ham and cheese in the bun in a piece of foil and I just keep them in that front seat down at my feet warming in the crockpot and then when we stop for lunch we’ll just stop at a rest stop and break out bottled water and eat our warmed hot ham and cheese sandwiches.

And that’s a real inexpensive meal that gets us further down the road before we have to start buying restaurant dinners.

4. Choose Places Where Kids Eat Free

And then when we do go to restaurants this is not as helpful to us at this point when we’re just traveling with our own children. It still is very helpful when we’re traveling with grandchildren and that is to search out the kids eat free restaurants.

I have a link on our website that I’ll include that has a bunch of kids eat free restaurants here in Tyler but also another page that has general kids eat free restaurants that are like chain restaurants and whatnot. You’d probably want to call the ones in your area or in the area you’re visiting before you actually went and make sure that they honor that program. But that can save you some money.

We always do Luby’s. I think I talked about that on my San Antonio trip episode. I will link that one in the show notes too. But Luby’s usually — all across the country — has kids eat free on Wednesday evenings and all day Saturday.

And so when we’re traveling with the entire family, we’ll have 40 people, 20 of whom are children. And so it’s usually one child’s meal per adult meal purchase but our family is such that we have one adult for every child. So it ends up being we get all the kids free and just pay for the adults that way.

5. Use Restaurant.com Dining Certificates

Another option is to use restaurant.com certificates. I’ll link that in the show notes also.

We’ll do this when we travel also because you can purchase gift certificates on restaurant.com that are like for $25 off a $50 ticket. So you end up getting it at half price. But of course you have to pay for their certificate.

And normally those certificates are $10 a piece for the $25 certificate which is a savings but it’s not amazing. It’s you know $10 for $25. I don’t know.

I never spend $10 for $25. But once you get on their mailing list they send you a couple of times at least three or four times a year promotions where you can get those restaurant.com certificates for $2 a piece $25 for $2 a piece and now suddenly that’s quite a savings that’s $23 savings when you use that. And the other thing about the restaurant.com certificates is that they never expire and they are exchangeable.

So if I plan a trip to Boston and I think we’re going to eat at this certain restaurant and I buy the restaurant.com certificate and print it out and have it with me and I’m ready to use it when we get there and then our plans change and we end up not eating at the restaurant I had picked. Well I can just tear up that certificate go online and exchange that certificate for something I will use. I get the same amount off.

So if it were $25 certificate I can just exchange it for any other $25 certificate at any restaurant. I have a blog post that talks more in detail how I do this and gives you all the specifics so I’ll link that in the show notes as well. But it’s a great plan and it’s not just $25 certificates.

You know you may be thinking oh our family’s too small we wouldn’t spend $50 at a restaurant or our family’s too huge and $25 wouldn’t make a drop in the bucket. Either way you can find certificates in bigger and smaller denominations. So you might get a $10 certificate or even a $5 certificate off a $10 meal if you’re dining alone or if you have a crowd like ours and you’re trying to feed 40 people you can sometimes get a $100 certificate off of $200 tab.

So it’s still half price for the food that you’re eating which is a great deal in my opinion especially if you’re going to have to be eating out anyway. But of course it’s only at specific restaurants.

6. Earn Airline Miles While Dining Out

And then another thing that we do is we try to pick restaurants that give us airline miles while we’re dining and every now and then we can we can really double or triple up because I will cross reference the lists and sometimes find a restaurant that takes restaurant.com certificates has kids eat free a certain night of the week and gives us airline miles.

There’s one south of New Orleans that we go to every time we’re there because we can do all that plus they have half price appetizers all day Tuesday. And so we always eat at that place. It’s great food.

We get airline miles. We get to use our gift card and we get half price appetizers. So and a lot of the appetizers are like chicken strips and things that would really serve as meals for little ones and so or could be shared by little ones.

And so that is an economical way to use all those programs at once. But anyway the airline dining miles we use the Advantage Dining Club. There’s others that are similar but you can only sign up for one.

Like if you do iDine you can’t do Advantage Dining also. And so you just pick one and stick with it. Southwest has a dining program too.

Anyway we earned enough miles to get our family to Europe three times for free. The first time we took 12 people and then the next two times we took eight people each time because a lot of our children were grown and gone or were in college by the time we went the second two times. And so that was a great deal and most of those frequent flyer miles that we used to get those tickets were not earned by flying frequently because we really aren’t very frequent flyers.

We will fly if we’re going somewhere we absolutely cannot drive like Europe or Peru or something like that. But we usually take road trips when we’re going across country and by eating at restaurants almost exclusively that give us miles per dollar spent whenever we’re on the road we can really rack up a lot of miles. It took us several years maybe a decade to save up for that first trip but then we were able to save up for the next one faster.

I think we built a house during that time and ran as much as we could through a credit card that gave us advantage miles also. Anyway I have a article on that on the website as well I’ll link it in the show notes and I’ve also written a book called Pack Up and Leave that has a lot of the different tips for traveling with kids in that book I’ll link it in the show notes also.

Explore Different Lodging Options

And then finding a place to stay….

1. Stay with Family Members

Lodging options can vary from staying with family, which is usually free. That’s nice: staying with relatives .

2. Pitch a Tent

Or you could pitch a tent. That is relatively inexpensive — to go camping.

3. Book Discounted Hotel Rooms

You can get a hotel room and, again, try to take advantage of a AAA discount rate or, if you’re in the military, by all means ask for the military discount. It’s usually substantial.

Or use save points if you’re pretty loyal to a certain chain of hotels. We use Choice Hotels all the time when we’re traveling on these long road trips, and so we get a lot of our stays free with points at those places, too.

4. Trade Houses with a Friend

Or you can rent a house or swap a house. If you have friends who live where you want to go, and they want to come visit where you live, y’all can just trade for the week. Or you can look on airbnb for houses that are for rent.

5. Consider Time Share Programs

And then also there’s timeshare. We actually own a kind of timeshare now. It’s Bluegreen Resorts. And we have been really happy with that. Once our family got so big that we could no longer fit in even two hotel rooms, [traditional hotel chains] were wanting us to rent three hotel rooms or more every time we traveled, so we started traveling with Bluegreen because their accommodations were two to three bedrooms with a full kitchen and laundry.

So it made sense for our family at the place that we were in when we joined so it doesn’t make sense for everybody, I know, but if if you have a big family and do a lot of traveling, you might check into that. I’ll include a link for that in the show notes.

Miscellaneous Travel Tips

1. Travel Light

Then miscellaneous travel tips would include things like traveling light. Boy, that’s so important! When we were backpacking Europe, our shoulders were burning so much because we carried things that we might have been better off leaving at home.

The first time we went, it was before we even had smartphones though, so I had travel books or I had photocopied pages that were pertinent from my travel books, plus I had a paper itinerary of all of our hotel reservation information. All that that i carried in mine.

But paper is really heavy and so, now that there’s smartphones, you can carry your reading material [and itineraries on your phone], if you can stand to read digital. My husband loves to read digital books. I really like paper and pencil. But the paper is heavy, so if you don’t have wheels on your luggage, you might want to leave the extra, you know, don’t take four or five books at once. Although that’s very hard for me not to do that. And now my luggage has wheels (including my backpack), so it’s not as big a problem as it once was.

2. Keep Toiletry Bag Stocked and Ready

So traveling light: I [also] keep a stocked toiletry bag in our suitcase at all times, so it’s ready to go. I don’t have to remember the deodorant and shaving cream and shampoo and all that and gather it up every time we take a trip. I just keep one set in the travel bag, and it’s ready whenever we are.

3. Organize Clothes in a Way that Makes Sense

Especially when my kids were younger and I was packing everything into one suitcase, I would pack per day. So I would give [my children] a list of the — or if they were babies, I would gather their clothes myself — and just make a stack of: here’s Mom’s outfit, Dad’s outfit ,and an outfit for each one of the children for Monday. And then here’s the stack for Tuesday, for Wednesday, for Thursday….

The nice thing about doing that is that, even before we could afford luggage, we had just a duffel bag that would fit like one day’s worth of clothes for our entire family in it. But I would put paper sacks in the back of the car labeled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And each day when we would stop at the hotel for the night, I would take in that day’s [sack of clothes] inside the duffel bag and then the next morning we would put the dirty clothes back in the paper sack, carry it out in the duffel bag.

So it didn’t look like we were just carrying grocery sacks full of dirty clothes — or clean clothes, either one. We had the duffel bag, but then we would just, every morning, switch out yesterday’s dirty clothes for tomorrow’s clean clothes. And then we had on what we were wearing. So we would just take one bag in at every stop, even though we had maybe six, seven, eight kids at the time. It would just be one duffel bag for all of us, which was great.

4. Wear Coordinated Colors

Now that they’re older, I let them pack themselves. I still — a lot of times — will give them a list of the colors that I’d like us to coordinate. So that our pictures look nice, and it’s easier to count heads. But they pack it in their own backpacks.

5. Keep Emergency Supplies Handy

Then we do so much of our traveling in the van that I keep emergency supplies in the car. You know, like motion sickness medication and Tylenol and Advil and sunburn medicine and triple antibiotic ointment, band-aids and gauze and scissors and that sort of thing?

So i keep that in the car in the little console between the driver’s and passenger seat. I have little file bags. They’re labeled, so all the medical supplies are in one and office supplies — scotch tape and pens and pencils — in another. And the beauty supplies — that includes safety pins, hair elastics, combs and brushes, chapstick, and a sewing kit for mending and and that sort of thing — are in that.

6. Make Drive Time Pleasant

And then, of course, one consideration to make when traveling with children is to keep them happily entertained on the road. Which is sometimes a challenge.

Any parent who has ever taken a trip with a child has probably heard that incessant questioning, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” I remember one time, traveling with our kids, before we had even gotten out of our home city my little girl who was maybe six or so at the time asked, “Are we there yet?” And we had not hardly even started out.

So my husband came up with a bright idea of saying, “Listen. We have four hours to drive, and if you can make it without asking me that question again until we get to our destination, I’ll give you a quarter.”

And so [our daughter] really wanted to earn that quarter, and she kept her mouth shut for about 20 minutes. And then she said, “Dad? Have we almost earned our quarters yet?” Which I thought was pretty brilliant. She didn’t ask the question that was forbidden, but she was still getting the information she wanted.

7. Listen to Audio Books on the Road

So other ways to keep them happy: We listen to books on tape in the car. I really enjoy that — the parents enjoy it as much as the kids. Sometimes if it’s a really interesting book, we end up having to stop it several times to discuss what’s being said — especially if it’s non-fiction. But if it’s a fiction we’ll just listen and and take breaks only when we have to stop for the bathroom or for meals.

So books on tape — I say on tape, but they’re really digital now. We don’t even have a cassette player in our car anymore. We used to have all sorts of books that were actually on cassette tapes, but now we just stream them through Audible.

8. Play Travel Games

And then sing-alongs are fun or collecting license plates. Sometimes I’ll print out a map, and the kids will just color in the state whenever they see that state represented on a license plate. That’s especially good if we’re going out-of-state on a cross-country road trip, because you can get a lot of different license plates in that situation.

And then mapping our progress: They can also use that same map to plot each stop. I’ll show them how far we’ve gotten from home, and they’ll just draw the little line from that city to the next and be able to see where we’re progressing.

Also, travel games are fun and paint by stickers. If you’ve never tried that, that’s a real easy and mess-free activity that kids can enjoy in the car, so I’ll try to link some of those items in today’s show notes.

But I hope –as summer is is right around the corner, I know school is wrapping down for most of us and you’re probably doing some planning for either a vacation or a staycation — I hope that some of these activities and ideas and strategies will help you in your planning.

May God bless you and your family with a wonderful bank that is filled to overflowing with shared memories and family bonding and opportunities for togetherness as you do life together.

More Travel Ideas for Families

If your family loves to go as much as mine does, check out my book Pack Up & Leave. It’s chockful of smart tips that will make your next family road trip or vacation more economical, educational, and memorable.

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