35. Toddler Drive Days: How We Do It

Of course shorter drive days are always better, but in terms of moving large distances in the most efficient manner, we settled on about 4-6 google hours per day. We have done as long as 8hrs by google, but that was only due to the prior truck failure and catching up, not recommended normally.

Night before: We have a car bag where we put a bag of dry snacks, an ipad, extra clothes, a few toys. We try to dump the tanks the night before if it makes sense.

Morning: We pack up everything before changing Jordan for the day. We found it easiest to do that in one fell swoop with departure. Basically, breakfast, put away everything possible before changing her clothes, then bring her to the truck as we bring in the slides and then hook up the truck with her fully strapped into her carseat.

Drive: We do half the drive before lunch, break for lunch and playground, then the second half. We plot out a good food and playground combination stop ahead of time when possible (I'll make a separate post about this later but the short version is, we use google maps street view). We bring a sippy cup of milk and containers of fruit in the car in the morning in their own cooler bag. She usually would get something like a popsicle for the second half along with some crackers, cliff bar, or other random snack.

Arrival: Bruce unhooks the truck and then takes Jordan to the nearest playground or rocks to climb in the area. We try to arrive by 4pm or so, which gives us time to setup, play, and then make dinner.

It's nice when we are in the middle of trips and only have to drive 1 day between locations, but on the longer cross-country portions where we need to travel far, we might stack 3-4 days of driving back to back. We actually did 7 straight days from Banff back to Vermont on the 2024 trip and it was ok, but Jordan had enough by the end. That was pushing it. In the future, Bruce will drive out ahead of time and go fishing for a few days, and then Anjuli and Jordan will fly out to join so that Jordan doesn't have to be do the long drives. Bruce can drive twice as far in a day by himself and he gets to fish while Anjuli and Jordan don't have to drive as much, so win-win as long as Bruce can manage it all by himself safely.

And back to the trip...