Road-Tripping With Teens
I just completed a road trip of around 3000 miles with two teenagers and a cat, as we headed for our new home in New Jersey, where my husband was already hard at work at his new job. When my teenagers pleaded with me to take the drive instead of the train, I was nervous. I hate driving and never go on freeways unless I have no choice. I had driven this same car from Illinois to California three years before on our previous move, but that simply involved following my husband, who was driving a big yellow moving van. This time it was just the kids and me. Oh, and the cat, who once again would spend a long journey critiquing my driving.
The reactions of others ranged from worry about our safety to worry about my sanity after spending two weeks in the car alone with teenagers. I was reasonably certain the teenagers weren’t going to be a serious problem. We’re homeschoolers and used to spending lots of time together. However, two weeks of their music was another story, so I decided we should make plans.
I wanted this trip to be a team effort, so together we plotted our route, studying maps and internet sites about various interstates. My only stipulation was that the route must include visits to Mississippi to see my Godchild and her wonderful family, and to Kentucky, to visit my dear friend Patricia. They weren’t exactly on the way, but that was my reward for two weeks of driving. Since the route also had to include as few interstate changes, merges, and big cities as possible, we were required to call on my son’s talents as a navigator. We finally chose Interstate 40, which wasn’t the most direct route but it appeared to be an easy one we could take all the way to Memphis if we didn’t mind a little overlap, and we didn’t.
The next consideration was the car. My son packed a little duffle bag with a few items of clothing and then glared at his sister and me for overstuffing two large bags each. He didn’t understand what we could possibly need to sit in a car all day. We didn’t budge, however, and our stuff stayed. Because we had to go through some intense deserts, we took along a lot of bottled water and non-perishable food. If we broke down, we wanted to be able to take care of ourselves until help arrived. Ice chests allowed us to pick up breakfast to eat in the car and lunch wherever we were, since we couldn’t leave the cat in a hot car. Dinner would be eaten after we stopped. Two cell phones insured we could get help even if one telephone died, and we made sure our roadside assistance program was paid up. We had the car inspected, the oil and fluids changed and filled, and took other precautions to be sure we were ready.
We chose to start early and to end each day’s journey by three o’clock or so. We used a trip planning program to figure out approximately where we could stop each day, and also noted the biggest cities just before and after those areas, in case we had trouble finding motels. Stopping early allowed time to get dinner, do laundry if necessary, and relax a little. For my own sanity, I got my own motel room each night. I needed down time after a long day of driving.
We felt secure after so much planning, much of which was based on what we had learned during the previous road trip. To be completely safe, however, I asked a friend to give me a priesthood blessing for added security. We listened carefully, and adapted some of our plans to do as we were instructed. Since we were told to use some of our car time to read and discuss scriptures, we placed two sets of scriptures in the car, chose what to read, and decided each teen would read aloud for fifteen minutes. The blessing promised the children would not bicker, but I reminded them they had to do their part by trying not to bicker, and that helped us throughout those inevitable times when tired or worried people turned cranky.
As I tried to prevent bickering, I thought about music. All of us have very different tastes in music. To prevent arguments, each teenager brought headphones so we didn’t have to argue about what to listen to. My daughter sat in the front seat the entire trip, because her Beach Boys music, audible to me in spite of headphones, was more acceptable to me than the music my son preferred. They understood they had to remove the headphones regularly, to read scriptures, to help with navigation, to hold actual conversations, or to keep me alert when I became tired.
Each person had assigned tasks and we were able to leave our hotel rooms and reload the car very efficiently. Somehow, each teen developed a talent for certain things and my daughter became the expert at repacking the car each morning, no easy task since our gear seemed to expand in size overnight. My son was the navigator and cared for his sister’s cat.
I tried (not always successfully) to refrain from my ingrained role as a teacher, but we did discuss informally what we were learning as we traveled through the south, which none of us had ever seen before. We compared our impressions of the scenery, the friendly people we met, the new experiences we had. We attended a tiny ward in Mississippi and came away touched by their kindness and concern for a family of strangers. We ate foods we’d never tried and heard music unfamiliar to my children. We were welcomed into the homes of our friends, who were mostly new to my children. We debated what our favorite memories were, which places we loved the most, and where we wanted to return someday. The children added the words “y’all” to their vocabulary after nearly a week in the south. In Kentucky, we talked about our ancestors, who lived on the other side of the state for many generations. Without opening a single book, other than the atlas, it was homeschooling at its best, far more enlightening than any geography course had been.
Following is the short list of what I learned about successfully road-tripping with teenagers:
1. Let your children be partners in the planning, and in the decisions made along the way. Be the final vote only when safety or morality is an issue.
2. Plan carefully and consider every possible emergency.
3. Internet and telephones help prevent homesickness.
4. Take lots of breaks and stop early.
5. Let each person have his own music.
6. Plan for entertainment, since you won't want to talk all the time.
7. Pray before leaving the hotel.
8. Read scriptures in the car in the morning to set the tone.
9. Work to create a memory by planning for special moments.
10. Get a blessing before leaving.
11. No trip will be perfect. If you find yourself snapping at each other or making mistakes, acknowledge the mistake, forgive and forget, and then move on.
12. Praise your children several times a day for their contributions to the success of the trip.