A lot of our friends and family ask us what we “do” when we’re in the car on our road trips. It’s a great question. When our kids were younger, it was movies, tv shows, etc. We’d get head phones splitters, so, even after we had reached our limit of children’s entertainment, they could all listen to the same show and get to share the laughs with one another.
As soon as they were old enough to start listening to audiobooks, we cut out the tv shows and movies and started listening to the Chronicles of Narnia, and other age appropriate books. But, even that wasn’t just us all passively listening. It pretty quickly became a routine habit to pause the book whenever something struck us as really interesting, or, when the author was trying to convey a message that we really wanted the kids to pick up on. We’ve listened to the entire Harry Potter series on audio book TWICE, as a family, along with countless other books, and tons of music – always pausing to talk about the message and to share insights with one another.
Then there are trips like our most recent road trip where the five of us talked to one another – for almost all of the trip. There were only two one hour stretches where we listened to music or an audio book and neither of those were requested by the kids. So, needless to say, we enjoy hanging out with one another.
It might sound strange, at first, to imagine spending all that time having conversations with your kids. You might think, “what could you possibly have to talk about for all that time?” I don’t blame you for wondering. I mean, If you would’ve asked me if we would enjoy a road trip that covered over 4,000 miles and didn’t include listening to a book, or music, I would have hesitated to say yes. I’d have thought, “how could we possibly not run out of things to talk about?” Even more than that, I would have been sure that the conversation would linger on a topic that most of us enjoyed, but, that not everyone enjoyed **cough-ice-hockey-cough-cough** … Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t need to drive the conversation. The kids directed the conversation with questions – the same questions that, on a normal day, the grown-ups brush to the side, because they have “important” things to attend to. As it turns out, those questions come from a nearly bottomless repository. An endless thirst to know what we think about an endless ocean of topics. Although, admittedly, I did need to drive the conversation away from ice hockey, a few times. My sons and I can talk about draft prospects, or free agency, or line combinations, all day long, but, I know that my wife and daughter cannot listen to it all day long, while maintaining their sanity. Once we got past the hockey talk, everyone could get on board with pretty much everything else. If you’re answering honestly, there are “I don’t knows,” and a healthy amount of googling. But, imagine how long you could talk with your closest friends – about life, the universe, society, politics, sports, literature… That’s what we did. We talked. For countless hours, about endless things. Stopping often to point out some amazing sight, and then diving back into our conversation. Those conversations have become my favorite part of our road trips and I very much hope that you get to have that same experience.
Family Road Trip 