Grand Canyon, Arizona

People talk about “bucket lists” on travel sites.  I’m not real keen on that phrase for a few reasons that I won’t go into here.  If I did have a bucket list though, taking my kids on an epic USA road trip would be one of them.  After seeing my gorgeous friend Sam’s equally gorgeous photos of her own epic USA road trip with her two young sons on Facebook I asked  her if she would share her experiences, photos and tips here.  Yay, she said “yes” and this post is the result.  Sam is currently an Aussie expat living in Texas Houston and is attempting to explore as much of the USA as she can before she returns to Oz next year.

mural on the side of a shop in Silver City, New Mexico.

The Route

In an attempt to escape the hot humid Houston summer and to see more of the USA we recently embarked on an ambitious road trip with our two young boys aged two and five. Starting out in Houston, Texas we drove all the way to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, taking about three days to get there. Leaving on a Friday afternoon we stopped overnight in Dallas Texas, Salina Kansas, Valentine Nebraska, and finally arriving at a campsite about ten minutes from the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota.

We camped at Mount Rushmore for three nights before moving on to hotels in Cody Wyoming, Rexberg Idaho, Springville Utah and attempted to camp at Lake Powell in Arizona. After a failed attempt at camping at a site infested with nasty thorns all through the sandy ground, we opted for a hotel in Page, just down the road. Through Arizona we stayed in a hotel in Tuba City on Navajo lands and then on to Holbrook. From here we turned east into New Mexico, staying in a hotel in Silver City and later Alamogordo, then camping at Fort Davis in Texas followed by a hotel in New Braunfels before finally completing our circuit, returning to Houston. In short, we drove all the way around Colorado without going in, covering 4951 miles or 7968 kilometres over 17 days. In Australian terms, it was like driving from Victoria to Queensland and back.

With so many days on the road, so many hotels and campsites and tourist attractions along the way, how did we manage with two young boys?

Presidential Monument, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

How we prepared.

Pretty much as soon as the next vacation is announced, Master Five sets off to his room to pack and Master Two is inclined to do everything that his older brother does. To harness this energy I had to start coaxing their enthusiasm in the right direction . I cut a large piece off our roll of paper and started creating some lists with the help of my two apprentices. Across the top of the horizontal page I wrote the following headers: food, shelter, clothing, activities. Underneath these is where we built the lists of the relevant items. As things slowly got packed we created a staging area down in the garage, outlined in chalk, approximately the same size as the boot of our car. Once things were added to the staging area we added a green dot next to those items on the list, and again on the day we departed we put a purple dot as we packed the car. I felt we needed to go to this level of organisational detail because of the nights spent camping. Had we been staying in hotels all the way it would have been a much smaller job.

planning in progress in the living room

Camping

We started out small by staying in an established camping ground with lots of facilities and activities. In fact the first campground that we had booked turned out to be not much more that a paddock with long grass and an ablution block. Wanting to make the boys’ first camping experience a positive one, we left to eat lunch and have a think about our options, ultimately opting for a different place entirely. This was a good decision because we then had some equipment failures and the campground with more facilities had a shop with some basic gear and repair kits for sale, plus a pizza shop. We thought hard about our aged camping mattresses before we left and decided that an upgrade would be needed. That translated to much better sleeping all round and also helped inform our decision to abandon camp when it looked like thorns would ruin our gear as well as our fun. Naturally, we carried our first aid/medicine kit but thankfully we only needed the adhesive dressing tape to repair a broken tent pole.

Somewhere in Nebraska

Hotel Accommodation.

Being the height of summer, as a minimum requirement our hotels all had to have a pool. Swimming helped the boys to burn off energy after sitting in the car all day and the grown ups to work out all the kinks in our muscles. Due to the distances we covered we did not necessarily have the option to stay consistently with one particular chain of hotel. When booking our accommodation we used booking websites to help us out which meant that only a few dollars separated each hotel. To help with the decision making we found that the online reviews left by previous guests very useful. We all used our roll-aboard cabin bags for our clothing which made checking in and out pretty easy, and people gushed at Master Two pulling his bag across hotel lobbies.

We also made sure that our hotels offered free breakfast, while the quality varied, it did at least mean that the boys were fuelled up until we could find something better. Naturally, we took our Vegemite with us.

Old Faithful, Yellowstone NP, Wyoming

Food.

On the subject of food, I had some excellent advice from a seasoned road tripper before we left. She said that we needed to know where our next meal was going to be as soon as we got in the car after the last meal. This was very sage advice – think about it, it’s dinner time, you are in a strange place, it is the witching hour, everyone is hungry, tired and a decision has to be made that will keep everyone happy. To this end we used Yelp and Urban Spoon extensively to help us find eateries at the next stop. Once we had identified our next restaurant, we would float the idea with the kids so that by the time we arrived they had bought into the decision too. Mexican/tacos won out on more than one occasion.

Bryce Canyon, Utah

In the Car.

Sitting in the car for extended periods is tough on everyone. To combat the boredom we used a number of strategies, none of which involved screen time. Sure, other families may use in-car DVD players, but we are not one of them. Instead, we used talking books, music, played games and talked to each other. On the talking books front, we are lucky that our car has headphone outlets in the back so we could put the Magic Faraway Tree on for the kids while we could listen to the radio up the front and still have the GPS telling us where to go. After a while we realised that anything more than one CDs worth of talking book in a day resulted in Master Five feeling very wound up so it was decided that one CD was enough per day.

The games we played included various classics including spot the different state license plates, spot the different road signs, road bingo and eye spy. Eye spy has been a huge success for us, even though not everyone can read yet. If you play it with a sound as opposed to a letter (which requires a higher level of literacy) then everyone can play from a very young age.

We were very careful about the snacks in the car. Too many packets of goldfish (A type of savoury biscuit) can lead to constipation, too many m&ms can lead to sugar crazed children who then crash just when you arrive. Everyone had their own water bottle that got topped up regularly and we just had to resign ourselves to getting the car shampooed once we got back to Houston – it cleaned up just fine.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone NP, Wyoming

Tourist Attractions.

When you have looked forward to seeing something for a very long time, perhaps even since childhood, it can be difficult when you then have to leave said attraction after perhaps only an hour. My dad always said when travelling “we don’t know when we will get back here” as a motivator to press on or to see stuff in the first place. It can get tricky for adults to balance this motto with the interests and attention span of the kids. I think in our case we were lucky because it was Master Five’s idea to visit both Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon in the first place. But not everything was a success for us and we did have to be mentally prepared to leave after just a short time, or perhaps divert to a cafe/restaurant to see if refuelling did the trick.

I do wish we had bought Master Five his own little camera before we set out because when we arrived at the Presidential Monument he was devastated that we would not hand over the expensive SLR camera for him to document the visit. Consider buying a cheap, simple, rugged digital camera for the kids to use so you don’t have to endure the tension of sharing your expensive/complex/delicate camera or hand over your phone only to see it fall a very long way down, never to be seen again.

Many attractions offer kid-specific activities and Master Five was thrilled to dig up his own fossil at the Mammoth Dig in Hot Springs. He did this during the kids’ palaeontology/geology class using the same techniques that he had just seen real palaeontologists use for real on the dig. This bought the rest of us some time to explore the mammoth dig further and to learn more about mammoths in general. Caving was not a successful excursion for us, it might be better left until they are older, although my two carnivores still talk about the cave bacon formations we saw, as well as stalactites and stalagmites when it comes to the contents of noses. Purchasing a National Parks and Monuments Passport was an excellent decision.

Great Salt Lake at the Spiral Jetty, Utah

The National Park Service sell a little passport that is aimed at kids and contains a map and some brief information on various National Parks and Monuments located across the USA. The rest of the pages have space for stamps. When you visit a National Park or Monument, the visitor centre or the main souvenir shop will typically have some rubber stamps and an ink pad available for kids to stamp their own passport. Master Five was thrilled with his and will no doubt treasure it for many years.

Based on the advice from the same friend who gave me the tip about our next meal, we visited the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis. Despite it being a very late night it was a surprising success. We knew this adventure was coming up and encouraged the two boys to sleep as much in the car that day and the following day would be spent mostly in the car so we were confident that tired children would be able to catch up on sleep. Nevertheless, I felt we should be prepared for tired tantrums and an early exit. Instead the boys were both entranced by the amazing details and facts about the moon (we happened to be there on a full moon), the constellations pointed out with a very powerful laser pointer and of course seeing objects far off in deep space including Mars, Saturn, some nebulae, a binary star system and many other things via various telescopes. I guess my point here is that if you prepare the kids, you might just get away with it.

Grand Canyon, Arizona

The Grand Canyon also presented a challenge in that it is just plain huge. Most people try to devote several days to a visit and prior to kids we would have wanted explore it by hiking and rafting. We would still both like to hike and raft the Grand Canyon and spend several days about it, but instead we opted for a 45 minute scenic flight and saw a whole lot of canyon from the air. It was probably the most expensive activity of our trip, but as dad says “we don’t know when we will get back” so we did it with no regrets. It was a most spectacular flight and a highlight for all of us.

In the end we were glad to get back to our own beds and to take a break from restaurant food; two full weeks plus a weekend was quite enough. Mount Rushmore was the only place where we spent multiple nights and were able prepare our own food and that sense of stability was very helpful for all of us. If we were to do the trip over again I would not add in more destinations but I would try for more two or three night stays somewhere along the way. I think our Great Griswaldian Vacation will become a highlight of our time living in the USA.

Bubs on the Move provides tips and advice for parents traveling with small children including attraction and accommodation reviews. You can join us on Facebook or Twitter to receive updates to your news feed.

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