“Punch buggy blue! No punchbacks, no bb shots.”
“Punch buggy cerulean!”
“Mom, he stole mine!”
“Mom, she punched me!”
“You didn’t say no punchbacks.”
If you’ve been a passenger in my minivan sometime in the last six months, it probably comes as no surprise that I recently outlawed the punch buggy game. Last fall, on a trip from Houston to Fort Worth, the kids were bored, and I was wracking my brain for ways to entertain them when a Volkswagen Beetle drove by. A vision flashed in my mind of sitting in the back of my parents’ Toyota Corolla hatchback with my brother and sister, searching for punch buggies as we drove to Pennsylvania to see my grandma, or to Florida to see my other grandma, or to Tennessee to see my godmother. Until I told the kids all about the game and how to play, I forgot about the actual punching part, forgot about the incessant squabbling it inspired, forgot that I often emerged from the back of the car hours later covered in bruises.
My kids love the punch buggy game. They told their friends about it. The told their cousins about it. I”m probably seen as the family pariah who introduces inane and violent entertainment to the next generation. They even extended the game to include all Volkswagens and any other vehicle that resembles a Beetle (Mini Coopers and PT Cruisers are fair game, for example). And I’ll admit that it’s really cute when my two-year-old wants in on the action and calls out: “Punch buddy bwoo, no baby shots.” But it’s not cute enough to let the warring in the back of the van continue.
A week from today, we’re loading up to go on a road trip. Not a long one, but long enough that I need more than a They Might Be Giants cd to keep the boredom at bay. Now that I’ve put a moratorium on playing the punch buggy game, I’m a bit at a loss for what to do to keep them occupied. We have DVD players, but we’re going to see the national parks, and if I bring them, the kids will opt for a millionth viewing of Bee Movie over actually looking out the window at the scenery. The alphabet game (where we look for words beginning with each letter of the alphabet) works much better in urban areas than in rural Southern Utah, and if I have to play “I’m going on a picnic” one more time, I will scream. I’m not joking about that.
So here’s what I need: your best road trip survival tips. How do you get through a road trip feeling like family togetherness builds your relationship instead of making you filicidal?
And can somebody tell me what a bb shot is?
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Tags: fighting, games, going insane, road trips, siblings
It depends on the age of your kids, but we have had successful trips listening to books on tape (they probably have cds too for the more technologically up to date!). The best adventures were the Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites series by Chris Heimerdinger. There are ten of them, so that covers a lot of time.
My kids wouldn’t want to get out of the car so we could hear the next part of the story (okay, I didn’t want to get out either!).
I loved singing together in the car growing up, but haven’t been able to pass this one on to my kids.
Good luck!
I second the audio books idea. That is our family tradition whenever we go on car trips. For older children I suggest the Chronicles of Narnia series.
We loved the Tennis Shoes series, too, but we were low tech and read them aloud to each other. We also did a lot of Mad Libs and some travel trivia game that fanned out. Mom got some travel board games that were magnetic (like Sorry! and checkers) for the older kids, too. Our family crossed the US like 6 times with five kids in a station wagon! Three days in the car is a nightmare by the end, but now, 20 years later, I remember those times fondly and pity the kids today who just watch movies and listen to Ipods.
I recommend Enya tapes for bringing some serenity.
Instead of punch buggies, I recommend looking for pa-diddles and per-dunks. Pa-diddles are when you see cars with one burned-out headlight. Per-dunks are cars with one burned-out taillight.
Yea, padiddles!
We’re leaving in a week to take our preschoolers on a road-trip. I’ve broken it up so that we don’t drive for more than 8 hours a day, but that’s a long time for a 2 and 4yo. One suggestion I’m doing (other than library movies that they haven’t seen and stopping at playgrounds) is wrapping up small, cheap “presents” that I will hand out when needed. I’m just wrapping up small playthings in tissue paper. I may stop by the second-hand store to see what I can find on the cheap.
Books on CD!!! We just got back from a road trip to Mt. Rushmore from Utah…a lot of time in the car. And our saving grace was definitely the goofy books my husband picked up from the library on our way out of town. We have also done the “present” thing, this works great as well. When all else fails the better the snacks the quieter the car.
How timely. We leave in two days to go from Texas to the Motherland (aka Mormon Mecca). I need these ideas too!
The most awesome books on tape we ever found were the “Wayside School” series by Louis Sacher. The books are funny by themselves, but the guy that reads them is hilarious. The BBC radio “Lord of the Rings” was also fun.
For the next trip, we’re considering instituting peace-and-quiet time: from X:20-X:30, every hour, no music and no talking, short of a blood, fire, or broken glass emergency. The noise gets to everyone after a while.
It’s amazing how time dims the bad memories and glorifies the good ones. Our girls 32, 30, 27 and 23 remember the road trips fondly…(an ice storm that closed the interstate into Florida on Dec 23,1992…we slept on a cement floor in a tiny church till the road was reopened. A car breakdown outside Buell,Montana during the very time when Harley Davidson riders were having an annual gathering — we were rescued by big burley “bikers”)
But planning a trip disaster isn’t a very effective way to amuse children on a long trip, I suppose.
We handed each child a baggie of nickles. I took one away everytime they punched a sister or complained about the long drive. If they could hang onto the baggie for 2 hours, we’d make a stop and let them spend the $2 roll of nickles. I’m afraid now-a-days you’d need a $10 roll of quarters, though.
When we drove from Richmond VA to Yellowstone Park the year our 3rd went off to college, the girls were so lost in their gameboys that we instituted a “ooh-ahh” rule. If we felt they weren’t appreciating the scenery, I’d snap my fingers and everyone had to take a look at the scenery and say “ooh-aah” at least twice or I’d threaten to take away their gameboys. (Today that silly memory makes us all crack up).
Hang in there, you young moms. You’re building memories, I promise!
Kim from Richmond
Fun times!! What about a license plate hunt (for older kids). Print up a list of all 50 states for each player and they cross them off as they spot license plates from the different states. Not really competitive so much as interesting to see where folks are from.
Teki- We started that last summer on a road trip. We found 95% of the license plates the first few days. And finally saw Rhode Island in, um, April of this year.
We went from one side of the country to the other often as kids and now I’m doing it with my kids. I have a 4 year old and she’s always travels well, sometimes going 14 hours at a time, and we refuse to take a dvd player. We love to sing along to the music together…easy ones for her seem to be They Might Be Giants, Beatles, Pop stuff. We play the abc game…I would start with A and say apple, the next person B saying boy or anything that starts with the next letter. Then do it backwards and see if everyone can remember what letter comes next. The license plate game(haven’t with her yet but do with my husband)…you write down all fifty states and cross each one off as you see them on your journey. We love the the rhyming game…someone says a word and you take turns going around and saying a word that rhymes, no repeating until no more words can be thought of, then start over with a new word. We love roadtrip bingo with small prizes awarded for bingos. For older kids and adults we do the famous name game…I say Brad Pitt, then the next person says a first name that starts with the initial of that last name=P, so they’d say Paul McCartney, then the next person=M, Maralyn Monroe=M, Maralyn Manson=M and so forth. Our 4 year old loves it too, always saying cartoon characters so her likely answer would be Minnie Mouse, and we help her out a bit. It’s really fun and can last for hours as repeats are not allowed.
If I think of any more I’ll add them!
Audio books, definitely! We like the short stories, especially ghost stories. Sometimes we check out books about where we’re headed and read them out loud, too. Bring a pair of binoculars and let the kids take turns looking for wildlife. We got a National Audubon book about wildlife, plants, and rocks of the Southwestern states-it’s fun to see what we can identify. Have a great trip!
I was trying to figure out “punch buggy,” when I remembered we did “slug bug.” Only we didn’t have any rules–we also didn’t think to punch back, though!
I loved travel bingo as a kid, and we loved Mom reading The Hobbit to us.
OH, and we really really loved singing silly songs together.
My mom is still angry that I hid (and then destroyed) The Hobbit audio tapes. But if I had to hear them one more time I would have killed someone.
Time must fade things ‘cuz I don’t have any bad memories of car trips (I know stuff happened — just can’t remember it!).
.
! Sigh!
We’re definitely grateful for the in-car DVD player — we used to velcro a small TV/VCR to the arms of the front seat — the things we do to survive!
Getting a new movie or bringing a couple that you haven’t watched for a while works best.
Starting out way early helps, too — the kids sleep for half the time
Finding a park or interesting stopping point to let everyone eat, use the restroom & get the wiggles out buys you some more time.
Sadly, having the big kids need to stay home or be on missions makes less crowding, less fighting — and a tender-hearted mom
I didn’t take time to read all the above comments, so this might be a repeat, but my mom (mother of 11 wild indians) had to keep all of us sane in a big van without the modern TV… One thing she did (that we LOVE) was made “car kits” for each of us. It was fairly individualized, but we all got a few fun things…a new coloring book, a new doll (think dollar-store qaulity) or some other small play thing. It was SO fun to get “new” things, and when we got bored, we switched.
Anyway, that was something I loved growing up…I still remember some of the specific things I got on different trips.
Another plug for audio books. We recently took a 3-week, 11-state road trip with my 7 year old twins and my 5 year old, and listened to audio books the whole way. It was an awesome trip.
Get an account with audible.com, there are thousands and thousands of awesome audio books out there.
Harry Potter, Inkheart trilogy, Bartimeus trilogy, Peter and the Starcatchers trilogy, Percy Jackson series, Redwall series, the list goes on and on of the audio books we have listened to and loved. My husband and I love them as much as our boys.
We took a trip with a DVD player one time, and my kids watched for a while, but soon got grumpy and irritable. The audio books keep them happy and occupied, but still engaged in what is happening outside of the car windows.
If you can manage individual CD players with headphones for each kid so they can listen to their own music/audiobooks, it may save you some noise stress. Our last two day roadtrip had one portable DVD player, and two little “videonow” machines that played small videodiscs, though I don’t think they make those anymore. They took turns passing them around. My oldest packed books with her. I don’t know how she did that because I always got carsick when I read in the car.
If your kids can read very well, we always play the license plate game, where you have to make a word out of the letters in a license plate on the car in front of you. They have to remain in the same order. Example:
302 DVN
You could make divine, adventure, divan. You get the idea. Whoever makes the longest word wins. We still play it even when we are just driving around town.
cool car
My family takes many road trips, so we have a big load of traveling games. One of the simplest and most popular is the “Meow” game (though, as a warning, this CAN get anoying). The kids take turns singing the tunes of songs- only instead of saying the actually lyrics they sing the word “Meow”. The other players then guess which song it is, and the first one to guess it goes next.
The next one sounds trippy, but believe it or not its insanely popular and gets pretty hilarious. We call this one Telepathy, and its game play is similar to the board game “Apples to Apples”. One person is the “transmitter” the others the “receivers”. The transmitter closes her eyes (unless she’s driving!) and visualizes something in her mind. When the image is fixed she tells the others “Transmitting!” She then pretends to send out “psychic waves” to the other players, who then try to recieve them by visualizing things in their heads. When they have “recieved” the “transmissions” the recievers take turns describing what they visualized. The transmitter then explains what she was visualizing, and chooses the reciever whose “vision” was closest to hers. That person gets to be the next transmitter. This game relies heavily on hamming it up, and really getting into acting the part. Close your eyes and press your fingers to your temples. Say “Ohm….Ohm…” under your breath. When you describe your vision go for the theatrical- rather than saying you saw a pony in a field say you “imagined a great white stallion galloping through a mystic forest” or better yet, “I saw a great pegasus flying through a field of stars”. When the “transmitters” describe what they saw to you exclaim that it is “Very interesting” in a shocked tone of voice- as if they pulled the thoughts right out of your head.
I met a group of teenagers from Hong Kong recently who taught me a game commonly played there called “Ping! Pong! Wah!” that is great for car trips. The game play is pretty simple. players use their fingers to shape a gun, pointing at each other and calling “ping” “pong” or else pointing at the ceiling and calling “bang!” If some one points at you and says “Ping!” it simply becomes your turn to point at somebody else. If they shout “Pong!” you must throw your hands up in the air and shout “Wah!”. If, however, a player points her finger in the air and and shouts “bang!” all players must shout “wah!” and duck. This game doesn’t follow a particular order- you can chose to point at whoever you want- and it goes rather rapidly. The point is to pay attention so that you respond appropriately. I like this game because it isn’t especially competitive- nobody actually wins it, so no fights break out.