Car Trip Tips

The summer after we first arrived in American, and soon after Charles, my youngest, was born, we went on the first in a series of what Americans call car trips. The common definition of a car trip, which is an idiomatic expression you will not find in any English-German dictionary, is a vacation wherein a group of Americans, most typically a family but also sometimes friends or extended family, travel long distances by car and then drive back, sometimes by another route, to their original starting location. A regional, dialectical variation on the term car trip is road trip. If you hear car or road trip, understand that they have the same definition and can be used interchangeably.

Our first car trip was to Memphis in Tennessee, to see the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The drive, which took slightly more than 14 hours, was accomplished in one day. We drove south from Northern Virginia, through the Shenandoah River Valley, crossing the Great Smokey Mountains and driving across the state of Tennessee to reach Memphis on the banks of the fabled Mississippi river, making it in one day. We spent two days in Memphis then drove back via Lexington in Kentucky, which took nearly two hours longer than the drive out. During this trip, we were not able to sing songs with our children, since they only knew American songs and Joachim and Renate claimed not to remember or like any German songs. We solved the problem by having them watch videos documentaries on America’s wonderful national parks. They were entranced by the beauty of the parks, especially the bears of Yellowstone, until the Diphenhydramine, known in America as Benadryl; we’d given them after lunch began to take effect. We had heard from several of our neighbors that giving children dosages of Benadryl on car trips was quite common and generally recommended. I can report that it worked quite well, for hours there were no complaints and when the effects wore off, we fed them dinner, restarted the national park documentaries and gave them each another dosage.

On subsequent car trips, to Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks and to the Grand Canyon and back, which, remarkably, took us nearly a week, our children happily watched every single episode of the National Park documentaries many times over. We supplemented those videos with other instructive documentaries on subjects like weather, rivers and geology. When the outside light was too glaring for the DVD screen to be easily visible, particularly when we were not travelling at night, we purchased and used car window blinds.

My children have not been harmed by the time they have spent in the car. They are not less active or fit than they otherwise would have been. Joachim, for example, is fit enough to have been selected to play on an exclusive travel soccer team. They have learned a lot from the videos they have watched during drives. They know some of the information the videos so well that they have memorized the scripts. Renate is the first to ask us to turn on a video whenever we get in the car. They are often so eager, that they rush to ask for their personal favorites. Depending on the length of the drive, we usually have the children take turns by order of age. None of them has gotten car sick as they might have done if they were reading.