Help! We’re looking at traveling from Texas to Tennessee in the fall and we will be bringing our 2 year old and I have no idea where to start. Just curious everyone’s experience with traveling with a toddler. driving vs flying, do’s and dont’s, or anything to make the actual travel easier.
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We’ve never traveled few far from where we live, most maybe 4 hours, but I’ve found packing each kid a “travel bag” with fun activities, coloring books, easy games, music players help too, pillows and blankets, and of course their own snack bag too.
I’ve driven 18 hours with a 2 year old from east Tennessee to Dallas TX and it wasn’t terrible. I would have lots of toys and such he could play with and he had a DVD player to watch as we drove. I would leave extra early in the morning and we’d stop somewhere in the middle at a chik fil a to let him stretch his legs and play for an hour or so before we started again. Made that trip several times.
Travel at night when the baby sleeps
I used tontravel at night when my 4 were little, they sleep alot of the time, plus snacks, tablets and some toys/ tablet…
Just don’t expect anything to go exactly right. Prepare with snacks, colouring books, toys, etc. Be flexible and know that your kid may not want to do all the things so you might have to skip some stuff that you wanted to do. But if you focus on them and how their feeling not just dragging them around from place to place you’ll have a better time.
We traveled from Ontario to Philadelphia with our son who was 3 at the time and it went great. I bought a small backpack with some new toys, books, activities for him to play with on the way. We also stopped at a McDonald’s with a playplace so he could run around for a while and another stop was planned around a huge park, small hike to a waterfall so that was fun.
We just traveled a couple months ago 21 hours from Wisconsin to Florida and my daughter did great! The way back was a different story as she was definitely sick of being in her car seat. Tablet, DVD player, snacks, toys, and stopping every few hours at rest stops to run around helped. We stayed at a hotel mid point to break up the trip but if possible and there’s at least two drivers I’d definitely drive through the night if I had to do it over again. That would probably cut the drive down almost in half with the kids sleeping.