Simpler Travel with Kids

My husband and I have the travel bug. I caught it in high school while visiting the British Virgin Islands with one of my best friend’s family. Pretty sure it’s in Kevin’s DNA. Either way, being on the road or on an adventure or someplace new is our happy place.

As I write this, we are driving on the interstate in our mini van, another destination just a few hours away. The kids have finished up school and are on their screens, happily eating fig bars and counting the Teslas on the road. My husband is on a work call and I am typing away to you.

Travel with kids isn’t easy. It’s risky and exhausting and takes thought and preparation. But I will always argue it’s worth it. Experiencing different places with our family of six has allowed us time together to laugh, struggle, fight, make up, and create unforgettable memories. It’s given us time without distractions, without the busyness to just be together in the same place doing the same thing. And while travel with kids isn’t easy, we have found ways to make it simpler. Through (lots of) trial and error we have created some rhythms and rules to make travel with kids work for us. Our Intentional Living Experiment helped a lot with this.

My hope in sharing our rhythms and rules is to make travel more accessible, doable, and less stressful. The things we do will not work for everyone, but hopefully will inspire you to create your own rhythms and rules around travel to make it simpler and less stressful.

Simpler Travel with Kids

Decide Once Rules

I have cited The Lazy Genius principles more than once because, well, they are genius. Decide Once is a Lazy Genius principle and it is a life saver when it comes to travel. For us, we have a few Decide Once rules. We have made these rules slowly over time and they ebb, flow, and change as we do. Here are a few examples of our current Decide Once Rules.

We almost always stay in an Airbnb or VRBO when we travel. There are a few exceptions, like when we just need to stay one night or when my husband has an event at a hotel. But otherwise, a vacation rental works best for our family in this season. A washer and dryer, kitchen, and space to spread out is what we need to make travel work best for us.

While we are traveling to and from a destination, we don’t think about screen time or snacks because they are both abundant and we are okay with it. Travel is a change in routine and can be stressful for adults and children alike. When I travel my screen time and snack intake is more than usual and I’m okay with it because it doesn’t happen everyday. For us, the only rule when it comes to screen time and snacks while traveling is there are no rules.

For those of you who are struggling hard with this one, screen time is super limited when we get to our destination because we are out exploring. And since we stay in a vacation rental, we can cook and eat real food during our stay. You may not be able to live with this and that’s a-okay. We all get to choose our Decide Once rules.

To go along with the snacks, I always pack snack bags for each kid. The snack bags consist of a gallon sized Ziploc with non-messy snacks including granola bars, fruit snacks, raisins, crackers. Each kid gets a snack bag at the beginning of the trip and can partake whenever they feel like it.

These rules are specific to our family in this season. They may or may not work for you. My goal is to get you thinking about what Simpler Travel with Kids can look like for you.

Are there any Decide Once rules you can make now to make life easier when you travel?

Travel Rhythms

Our travel rhythms have been intentionally and unintentionally formed over numerous trips away from home. Like our Decide Once Rules, these rhythms have evolved with us as our family has grown.

One of our travel rhythms is straightforward: We like to travel in the winter. Our lifestyle is such that travel in the winter just makes sense. Our farm requires less of our attention and our kids aren’t currently in lots of activities in the winter. Also, we like to be warm and where we live just isn’t warm in the winter. This doesn’t mean we never travel during other seasons, because we do. It just means right now our family rhythm lends itself to doing most of our travel in the winter.

Our family likes to be active. One of our family threads is riding bikes. We do this often in the spring, summer, and fall at home. It just makes sense that we ride bikes when we travel to warm places in the winter. When I’m looking for places to stay, I take where we can ride into consideration because I know we will want to do this. Because this is part of our travel rhythm when we are traveling as a family, many times we drive instead of fly so we are able to take bikes with us.

Another travel rhythm for our family is we try and keep some of our regular rhythms. (I’m sorry, I’m sick of the word rhythm, too.) We still do school when it makes sense and we still have an hour or two of quiet time in the afternoons. Kevin is still in charge of breakfast, while I take lunch and we tag team dinner. Laundry is still being done on the daily and bed time routines are still loosely followed. There are times, of course, when we stray from our normal, daily rhythms. But as a whole, we have found travel to be simpler when we keep some of our daily rhythms in place.

Are there any rhythms that stand out from past travel? Are there rhythms you would like to keep, implement, or let go moving forward?

Travel is a lot with kids. It just is. But, we can make it simpler by implementing Decide Once Rules and thinking through Travel Rhythms. How can you try for Simpler Travel with Kids?