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⌈ Secret Post #4612 ⌋

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Does anyone here have experience with long road trips? Especially long road trips with kids?
Main character in a story I've been toying with has a six-year-old, and they're driving from Chicago to Portland. I thought that 2-3 weeks would be a good, relaxed sort of timeframe - a couple of hours driving every day, and lots of time at each stop to take in the sights.
And thoughts?

It depends on exactly what kind of roadtrip you have in mind, I guess. I think 2-3 weeks is way too long. Even if you don't push it, it's probably like 5 days of actual driving, 6 at most. And I don't see how you could really stretch it past 9 or 10 unless you had the characters stopping for multiple days somewhere along the way, or even multiple places along the way - obviously all bets are off if that's the case.

And in my experience, parents with young kids are likely to push the driving because driving a long way sucks ass and they want to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

You may be right! I live on an island which is like 6 hours across from furthest point to furthest point, so my perspective on things like this is a little... useless? Like when Americans talk about travelling an hour or more to work, that's just bonkers to me, lol.
So yeah, I'll compress that down a bit. Part of the issue, for me, is that they get stuck in Montana and don't make it to Washington - but they don't know that's going to happen, and I don't want to just go "And then they drove for a week and it was super boring and then PLOT HAPPENED!", you know?

Yeah it's tricky. I guess you probably can have day 1 as just the novelty of being on the road and driving, and then if you have them get to Montana sometime in the afternoon on the third day maybe, which is realistic, it only leaves the second day of driving to sort out.

And, IDK, maybe there's some roadside attractions in one of the Dakotas somewhere you can use for a bit or something.

(also, Portland is in Oregon)

da - I would rather cut off my toes one by one with embroidery scissors than spend eight continuous hours in a car

You don't do the 8 hours continuously, you do breaks for lunch / bathroom / snacks / stretch legs every 1.5 to 3 hours probably. 6-8 hours is the total driving time in a day probably.

Unless you're really pushing, in which case everything changes.

We did road trips from Arizona to DC, from DC to Alaska, from Arizona to Louisiana as a kid and, though there were a lot of us kids (3-5 depending), two weeks is too many, even one week is kind of pushing it. I'd recommend at least some of the driving be done when the kid is sleeping. I'd also say go for as long as possible the first day, so the novelty of it hasn't worn off.

Oh, fair point. The main character is a single parent, so I wanted to make sure she was well-rested, because it's not like she can get someone to take over in a pinch - but your point about getting a good distance in on the first day makes sense, I'll make a note.

Honestly, it really, really depends on the kids. In stark contrast to the other nonnies my family frequently did weeks-long road trips with three kids and honestly, we loved it.

We were absolute NIGHTMARE children on trips that were only like half an hour long. But stick us in a car for hours on end and we were blissfully happy.

holy jesus 3 weeks with a 6 year old sounds like pure hell.

I road trip regularly for both work and pleasure but "road trip" implies driving at least 6 hours a day, if not 8, because you're still trying to get somewhere. Only driving 2 hours is...well, let's put it this way, I drive 2 hours to get from home to a large city to do some specialty shopping and then back and it's been barely half a day, I'm back home in time for dinner. Allowing for sight-seeing, you still would want to drive much further than that and overall take no more than a week to get across country.

reminds me of the trip we took when I was a kid from here to Denver. Even stopping for an extra day in Rapid City to see Wall Drug, we still made the trip out in five days and that's with tourist traps and a zoo along the way. I don't think my parents would have survived taking longer to do that trip because kids get bored easily and at some point even stopping to see another roadside monument is boring as fuck. A six year old might not be able to appreciate the sights between here and Portland; the Corn Palace or Minneapolis Zoo, maybe, but Mount Rushmore? The endless expanse of nothing that is Wyoming? Mountain vistas? Nah. Tots aren't into that shit.

I don't have kids, but I've been on long roadtrips and that doesn't sound relaxing to me. It sounds like a living hell. Two hours a day is torturously slow when you're crossing that much distance, even if you factor in bathroom breaks and assuming you can find enough truly interesting roadside attractions every hundred miles or so. Shit, crossing Nebraska alone is like 7 hours straight driving - that's at least three days by your time schedule. No sane parent wants to spend that much time trapped in a car with a six year old. Unless you looooooove cornfields, there aren't going to be that many fascinating sights to visit. Assuming these people will be leaving each day in the morning, say around 9am, they're going to stop before lunchtime. Hotels don't usually allow check ins until 3pm. What are they going to do in Bumfuck, Idaho with a six year old for four hours? And after they check in, what are they going to do until it's time to go to bed?

Other pertinent questions:

* are these people planning to spend much time at their destination?
* are they going to take the same route back, at the same speed?
* who the hell has that much vacation leave?
* factor in how many hotel nights that is and how much that will cost. Even if you stay in cheap motels for like $50/night (and you do NOT want to do that, trust me) that's almost $700 for accommodations, doesn't include all the extra meals and gas money and you're not even in Portland yet.

SA as above, forgot to add that personally when I go on roadtrips I try to drive MINIMUM of six hours a day and that's only if the traffic is a nightmare and I'm going to be tired out from the hassle. 8 hours a day is more reasonable and if I'm with someone who can take alternate driving shifts, we're going to go at least 8, maybe 10 if we can.

America has a lot of land to cover, people are used to driving long haul if they want to get from one region to another. Unless you have all the time and money in the world, you don't really have a choice because you'll only have so many days of vacation time and you don't want to spend all of it on the road unless the journey IS the point.

I used to do yearly road trips with my family, only we'd basically drive 24 hours straight to our location, spend time there, and come back. Me and my sister would sleep mostly, we'd always pack a cooler and bucket of snacks, (cereal, sandwiches, chocolate bars, etc..) pillows, and blankets. Depending on the era you're writing in, we'd have little notebooks we'd draw in, or those little dvd players, later on our computers. Not sure if this helps, we were pretty well behaved I guess;; But it's what I got for my road-trip experiences...

[ SECRET POST #4612 ]

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