The Magic of Family Road-Tripping
Family Road Trips = Forced Family Fun (the good kind)
Have you ever seen that movie RV? You know - the one with Robin Williams. It's about a dad who drags his family halfway across the country in an RV thinking it's for a business trip but realizing somewhere along the way how being on the road with his family has changed everything.
Would you believe we had never seen that movie until about 3 months after we'd been living in an RV, dragging our own kids around on life-changing road trips? It's true - and we laughed our pants off when we watched it as a family.
The other day as I was walking around the campground, I saw a tire cover with a picture of a pop-up camper that said,
"Forced Family Fun"
It made me chuckle, and it reminded me of the movie RV and our very first road trips as a family of four. They weren't anything fancy - just day trips to the beach or the mountains mostly, but our most memorable one was a crazy two-week adventure from Georgia to Colorado for a white Christmas (a big dream for us when we came back to the States from living in Sydney where it's summer at Christmastime).
Babies cried, tempers were lost, and way too much fast food was eaten, but those first road trips changed us - they brought us together somehow.
That's why I love seeing other families going after those family road trips this summer - big ones, small ones, and everything in between.
Every family has its own way of doing road trips. I bet you're thinking about a few right now.
We still talk about those first road trips (mostly trying to remember where we saw this or that), and as we keep on taking them all these years later, my heart skips a beat every single time one of my boys chimes in from the backseat with a joke we all share from a place we've been together.
Those memories are why I think family road trips are the best kind of forced family fun there is.
It's also why I think that for some families they shouldn't just happen in the summer.
I think families who want to travel more should have the freedom to take family road trips more, but so many times, we encounter obstacles along the way. To help with some of those obstacles, I've put together a little something for you.
Over in the Togetherness Tips > TRAVEL section you'll find links to a few brand-new articles about the three things we worry about most when it comes to traveling more: money, living space, and school.
Let’s go after those family adventures you’ve been dreaming of together.
What's been your favorite family road trip so far?
Join the email group and shoot me your stories - I'd love to know!