#676 Road Tripping 101

Summer Series

Topics included in this episode -

• Road trips are a quintessential part of summer life; here's how to make your road trip a success, in stead of the kids driving everyone car-azy.

Find us on Facebook at Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families

Email us your questions and comments at [e-mail]

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the Happy Families podcast. It's the podcast for the.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Time poor parent who just wants answers. Now.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hello, this is doctor Justin Colson, the founder of Happy
Families dot com dou and the host of Channel Mine's
hit TV show Parental Guidance. Did I say host? I
just promoted myself. I'm the co host and I'm the
parenting the expert on the show Parental Guidance Season two
coming soon. I'm here with Kylie, my wife from Under
Our six Kids and the author of the world famous
Kylie's Corner on the Happy Families membership. Yes. Now, we've

(00:35):
made a commitment for these school holidays that we are
not going to be doing any road trips longer than
two hours, and it's been really nice to not travel
very far. But we have had to do a couple
of road trips from the Sunshine Coast, for example, down
to Brisbane Gold Coast, and we were fortunate enough to
sneak across to Tangalooma on Morton Bay Island as well,

(00:56):
which were Morton Island, I should say, which was which
was so much fun. So we thought, if you've got
any more road trips planned for the last couple of
weeks of the school holidays, we should do a podcast
to give you a few pointers, a few tips for
getting through road trips with little kids, with big kids,
and with grumpy partners and spousers who hate being on
the road and get frustrated when other drivers don't drive
the speed limit or when the freeway supposedly freeway is

(01:20):
more like a car park. Why are you looking at
me like that? Are you saying something with that glance
at me?

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Are you suggesting, missus coolson, that my driving is not
great for road trips.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
I'm suggesting that if you wanted to review that for
one of your New Year's resolutions, might be a really
good place.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Do you know what? I have been getting better and
better at this. I know that I have my moments,
But anyway, let's not go there right now. We're trying
to minimize the road rage, especially inside the car. So
tips for road trips with the little kids, big kids,
and everyone in between. Where do you want to start?
This is food? This is your specialty to be food.
Yeah yeah, yeah, But we've got to be careful with
the food, right because little kids, particularly but even big

(02:06):
kids can sometimes make awful messes and then you've got
to clean it up, get it out of the cracks
of the car seats and that kind of thing. But food,
food is food.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Well, if there's something else in their mouth, they can't cry, right.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Okay, So you want to have treats and you also,
you don't really want to be stopping every half an
hour at the.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Next supermarket of the next there's going to be enough
toilet stops, so if you can limit the other stops.
So make sure you've got enough water in the car.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I'm that driver though, when you get on the road,
I don't want to stop. You want to go to toile.
All right, we'll stop at the next town and I
say that name. The next town is like one hundred
and fifteen.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
CA's or just well early enough.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
The kids, hold on, they do, that's right, just stretching
their bladegead.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
We've had a couple of kids who we swear they
just needed to test out every town.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
In the toilet andund oh gosh. So plan your trip,
make sure you know where your stop's going to be,
and have food and water on board so that you
can minimize those stops, and so the kids can. I mean,
it's boring sit in the car. Let's be honest. Oh
totally okay. Next one, pack.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
As light as you can without sacrificing the things that
you need. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, there's been a couple of times where I've gotten
that wrong and we've had to buy We've had to
buy everything that we needed when we got there because
we packed two well, and.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Then we've got things wrong on the other end where
we've taken so much stuff that there's just no room
to move and it's very uncomfortable. So you want to
make sure that the car's got enough space in it
for everybody to kind of move without sacrificing the things
that you actually need. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Next one.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Music. Obviously, some families are not going to kind of
jump up, up and down over this one, but music
has played such a huge role in our kids' lives.
There are so many different games that we've played with there.
Sometimes it's just, you know, each person gets to be
in charge of.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
The next play songs whatever.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
For you know, fifteen or twenty minutes or whatever it is.
But then we play you know, name that tune where
we hide the screen, the led screen at the front
and they have to guess what the song is. The
girls actually play what do you call it. It's kind
of like the music alphabet.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, they just play games with songs. You've got to
come up with every song that you can think of
that is about dreams, for example, that's about dancing, and
it just song titles or song lyrics where that comes up.
And that's kept them entertained for ages. Ages, but when
they're little as well, I mean, let them, let them
listen to their favorite music. It makes it so much
more fun. Our favorite has our favorite one that we

(04:31):
found that works really well for card trips. I don't
know if I'm going to call her a favorite is
on Spotify. If you just google the go On a Gang,
and there's a whole lot of great Australian songs that
the kids just love, They absolutely love, and you do
get to a point where we've had enough wiggles, right,
so the Go On a Gang is kind of like
tolerable for a while. What's the next one?

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Podcasts and audio books?

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
You know, there's such a large variety of things about
for our kids these days, and sometimes when things have
got really out of hand, we actually just put some
really calm, classical music on to just calm everybody down.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
And well, I don't love it if you've got older kids.
Every now and again, I think it's fine to just say, guys,
put your headphones in. We're got to sit in silence
for the next half hour or so. Just listen to
something on your headphones, look at your phones, do whatever.
I don't like doing that though, because sometimes it's hard
to get them back out of it. They just think, well,
this is now where I can live for the rest
of the car trip. And I guess it depends on

(05:30):
how long the car trip is. Short ones, I'm not
a big fan of it at all. Long ones not
such a big deal.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Well, I know that you're really big on the kids
not having a huge amount of screen time, but I
do know in the early days we used to have
they used to have the LED screens in the back
of their head rests, and to be honest, it actually
just made the trip that much more comfortable for everyone.
The kids weren't distressed, they weren't upset because they were
completely engaged in whatever they were watching, and it just

(06:02):
made things a lot more comfortable for the whole car.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
And you remember those trips where I wouldn't let them
do it.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
It was awful.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Thank you, it was awful.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
But in saying that, I often would do the Brisbane
to Sydney trip on my own, so for all intents purpose,
single parent with six kids in the car, and this
actually just made it manageable. So if that's something that
you've got available to you, I'm going to say, go
for it.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
How many more have you got just one for little.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Kids car packs, just packing a few little things that
are specifically for them and them alone, and everyone's got
their own means that they've got something of interest.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Books, spinners, coloring in, whatever it is that'll get you through,
and it will make the road trip bearable hopefully. And
every now and again, you know what, sometimes I just
got to stop the car, get them out of the car,
put them on your knee and give them a great
big hug. Say I know anyly there.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
After years and years and years of doing the Brisbane
to Sydney road trips, we have multiple places along the
road where we can go, oh that's the park that
we stopped multiple times to just let the kids run
themselves ragged for a little bit.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
And sometimes you've actually got to stop and let them
do that. So we hope that these ideas will be
helpful if you have any further road trips to do
during the holidays. Back tomorrow with a great conversation with
Mayor Friedman. I can't wait to share that with you,
And then we're going to arrest the tricky topic of
sleepovers across the summer. That's Thursday's podcast. Looking forward to
that one as well. It's the Happy Families Podcast summer

(07:32):
series with Justin and Kylee