Things to do in the car

During the course of our 2014 Great Midwestern trip we traveled 3487 miles and visited five states (Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan).  That's a lot of time in the car.  On the plus side, I think we have the new car about broken in and have (maybe) figured out all the things it can do.

 Here we have both kids in the back seat, with their wireless headphones, ready to watch a movie.  Yes, I gave in and let them watch once in a while.  Really, it was just The Boy, though, the movie made The Girl carsick. This was after lunch on day two of driving all day...I didn't need The Girl to navigate, so she crawled in the backseat.  This would be just before I used my cell phone to order pizzas for pick up in the town of our first "stay with friends".

 Another activity that has always been popular on long car trips is playing with mom's camera.  Silly me, I thought he was going to take photos of scenery or something.  On occasion, there have been stuffed animal photo shoots--always interesting to find when I download photos.

 Ah, here's a portion of an animal shoot--notice Aardvark is wearing his Purdue shirt.

 Here is some scenery-the kids remember our visit to Springfield a few years ago and wanted to stop..Unfortunately this time I didn't build in time to do so.  Maybe some other trip.

 And apparently The Girl had the camera for a while, too.








The Girl's favorite car activity is (by far) sleeping.  She does a good job of not tipping over (usually) but was out cold when I stopped once...right over the cup holder.

We do use the CD player (and now the car's hard drive) much more than the DVD player though.  I picked out a couple books on CD ( see "what I read in July" and we also listened to "From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler"  (they liked it--yay!).  The Boy reads, The Girl navigates (or rather assists me in yelling at the navigation system when it is "confused"...I mean, I think I can find my way around Burrows, Indiana, even with the new road in place....).  We alternate books on CD with some of our car classics ("Bob and Larry go Country", "Billboards Top Hits of the 1980's...you know, classics, he, he, he).  We also keep a bag of "car entertainment" in the back seat year round--a couple puzzles (not great in the car, but good for sporting events or long rest area stops), some of those "question packs" (Sixth grade knowledge was our favorite this year, with "President Knowledge" also in the running) and other small games and "junk".  When the kids get really squirrelly, I have a bag of "activity slips" that they can draw one of--things like "Tell us about your favorite part of the trip so far", "What would you do with a million dollars?"  "What is your favorite Christmas song?  Now sing it".  I try to drive for 2-3 hours at a time--sometimes we make it less than an hour because I'm sleepy or someone has to use the bathroom) and occasionally we make it to 4 hours--usually if we are listening to a really good book on CD.
I'm sure there are other exciting things that we do in the car (drive across the Mississippi on really narrow bridges, anyone?) but I can't think of more right now...stay tuned!