Some of our Travel "Hacks"

We've gone on a lot of road trips as a family, and I always enjoy the organization and planning part of those trips. I like to try new things - "travel hacks," if you will - to make things go smoothly. Road trips have changed a lot for us as our family has aged. I remember the days of having two kids in diapers at a time and having to stop every two hours to change bottoms, make bottles, rotate toys, restart the portable DVD players, and wrangle everyone back into car seats. I've had to wash puke out of car seats on the sides of gas stations and blow dry them with the hand dryer in the bathroom. I've held up blankets while kids poop in a little, green IKEA potty on the side of the road. I've contorted myself over the seats of the car to move into the back to break up fights. Road tripping is always an adventure! 

It's gotten a little easier, though. Now our kids have tablets, and they are only allowed to use them on road trips, so that keeps them busy and entertained, and the van stays a lot cleaner without all the toys, crayons, and stickers of yesteryear. Our kids don't need as many potty breaks (thank heavens), so on our most recent trip to Disneyland, we only had to stop twice on the way home! We don't have car seats or diapers anymore, and right before this trip, I decided to get rid of the green IKEA potty we stored in the stow-n-go for years and years. That felt like a big step. 

Since we've been on a lot of road trips, we've also stayed in a lot of hotels, and that brings more opportunities to pack and travel creatively. Today I thought I'd share just a few things we've done for travel that have made things go a little smoother for us. These hacks might not work for everyone, but there might be something useful for someone here:

1. Bring (or buy) hangers

Hotel rooms tend to only have about 5 hangers on a good day, so I sometimes bring (or buy) a package of hangers so we can hang up more clothes. At the end of the trip, I just leave them. 

2. Bring garbage bags

For some reason, hotel rooms have the tiniest garbage cans on the face of the planet. Even when we get a suite with a kitchenette, they still somehow expect us to only produce one square foot of garbage during our stay. It’s especially annoying now that most hotels don’t do daily room cleaning anymore, so I bring big garbage bags so we have somewhere to put our garbage. 

3. Bring a toaster

We usually stay places that have a continental breakfast, but a lot of the hotels around Disneyland don’t do that (and I can understand why - would you want to feed hundreds of people headed to Disneyland every morning? Can you imagine how much free food they try and stuff in their pockets? Am I speaking from experience? I’ll never tell). On our recent trip, I decided to find a toaster at the thrift store to bring with us to our hotel. It was worth the four bucks. We had all sorts of toasted breakfast items in the mornings, and at the end of the trip, I left the toaster behind.

Why, you may ask, did I not just bring my toaster from home? Because ours is a double toaster, so I was keeping things on the smaller side, and this way I didn’t have to haul it there and back. I always like bringing less stuff home than I take (I'll discuss this more in a minute).

4. Bring frozen meals

Eating out on vacation with a family of six is very expensive (thank you, Captain Obvious), so when possible, we try to bring our own food. We still enjoy a few meals out, but we don’t want to go out for every meal, so we typically make a meal plan and bring our own food. Sometimes we will grocery shop at our destination, but I always prefer to bring all of our food, when possible, for a few reasons:

1). Going grocery shopping with the whole family in an unfamiliar grocery store is something I don’t want to do unless I absolutely have to (going to the grocery store without kids in a road trip/vacation hasn’t really been feasible thus far in our experience) 

2). It helps me keep the budget in check. I know how much everything costs at home, but when traveling to other areas, prices are sometimes much higher. 

3). If something is out of stock or hard to find, I have it taken care of before our vacation. 

I tried doing grocery pickup once and pre-ordered all of our groceries in Lake Tahoe so we could just swing by the store and pick it up before we headed to our condo. Our grocery order was missing so many things that we ended up having to drive back to the store anyway, so I haven't done it again. 

Bringing food on a trip is always a little different depending on the accommodations. Pretty much anywhere we stay at least has a tiny fridge and microwave. 

I bring veggies and dip on every road trip

There are some obvious downsides to bringing our food - it takes up extra space, and there are items we have to keep cold. It also requires a bit of pre-planning, but it works for us. 

For our trip to Disneyland, our hotel room had the traditional itty bitty fridge and a microwave. I prepared a bunch of freezer meals for us to eat in our hotel room - things that could thaw easily and be microwaved. We had tacos, pot roast, chicken noodle soup, sloppy joes, and lasagna. I froze the meals in bags and then put them in a disposable cooler (another thing we could ditch at the end of our trip, and since so much of the food was frozen, I didn't have to worry about ice). 

Hotel tacos

I wasn’t sure if this would be worth the work or not for a Disneyland trip - enjoying a homemade dinner via microwave in a hotel room only works if you go back to the hotel during dinner time (which we don’t). In the end, it was about 50% successful. Every night, Zoe had to be taken back to the hotel around 5:00 because she was DONE for the day, so Zoe and I were always there for dinner. No one else really was, and they didn’t really eat after they got back. We had a little too much food for this particular kind of trip. On trips with more downtime to enjoy dinner, this works much better. 

5. Have a gas station box

This is something new we did on our trip to Disneyland. We were really trying to keep things cheap on this trip (it turns out - buying a new van and planning a Disneyland trip at Christmastime is not the most financially responsible thing to do). We usually buy snacks at the gas station whenever we stop, and Zoe and Eva always beg for the stupid novelty candies, and we let them have them because we need world peace for the drive, and it shuts them up for a while. They’re super expensive, though, so for this trip, we bought a bunch of the dumb candies from Sam’s Club and NPS and put them in a box, then instead of buying treats at the gas station, we would let the kids pick a treat from the box whenever we stopped anywhere. 

We still have a lot leftover

I have to admit, I was surprised it actually worked! I thought they’d still beg for something at the gas station, but they didn’t. 

6. Pack things you're soon to get rid of

Sometimes when we travel (depending on what we are doing), we use things that we will be getting rid of soon. I pack shoes and clothes that are on their last straw so we don't have to bring them home. This is especially nice when we fly (which is rare) because we don't check luggage (Scotty has had his luggage lost twice, so it's a risk we don't take anymore, plus it saves time and money if we don't have to wait or pay for luggage). To free up space for souvenirs or other things we might bring back with us, we get rid of some stuff along the way. For example, a few years ago we flew our family to Disneyland, and we all took our oldest, most worn out shoes. We ditched about half of them for the flight home. We also packed some of our kids' oldest, worn out clothes for their "final wear" and ditched those, too. Then, Scotty and I packed our oldest garments that needed to be disposed of, and every night when we came back from the parks, we cut them up* and threw them away (you can take scissors on a plane if the blade is less than 4"). Thus, we had plenty of luggage space to bring home our Lego Store purchases. 

On our recent trip to California, we took some old beach towels that were fraying so we didn't have to haul sandy beach towels around in our car for a week. We ended up bringing them home after all, but we at least had the option to throw them away at the beach if needed. 

7. Bag the dirty clothes

Whenever we travel, I designate a suitcase or bag for dirty clothes (unless we are staying somewhere with a washer and dryer, like an Air Bnb or condo). I have everyone pack their dirty clothes in there. We don't separate whose is whose - it's just the "dirty" or "I will not be wearing this again" designated spot. When the bag/suitcase is full, we close it up and start filling another one. That way, as time goes on, we are actually packing to go home. At the end of the trip, we pack anything "unworn" together so when we get home, the clean clothes and dirty clothes are already separated. The "dirty" bags go straight to the laundry room and then everyone puts their clean clothes away. 

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So those are just a few things we've had success with when we have traveled. Every trip is a little different depending on what we are doing, but we try to make things easy and comfortable for everyone. It's always a lot of work, no matter what approach we take, but we've had a lot of fun on our family trips and hope to head out again soon! (No plans until summer thus far). 

A lot of you have been asking about Disneyland since our last trip and why we weren't happy with it, so I will write a post soon. I feel like I can handle it now. I needed some time to mourn. 

I've also been asked by a few people about taking food into the parks, so I will do a post about that, too, sometime soon. 

In the meantime, for those planning a trip, here is a post I wrote several years ago and have provided updates on. You can also check out this post for information that might be helpful, especially if you are taking kids. 

 

*Since these are religious clothing pieces, we are asked to cut them up before disposing of them.