Planning a road trip with children can be and exhausting adventure for the parents; between "are we there yet" and "I have to pee" your patience can really be tested, ruining the fun of the trip for everyone. I nice alternative is an in town adventure.

The key to planning a local road trip is to have an overall theme and to have several predetermined destinations. A time schedule is nice but the focus should be geared towards the fun.

Recently I planned such a trip with my family, my 14 year old daughter, and sons eight and three. The first thing I did was to gather a list of things that they each liked to do, and then to search the web for local attractions that would meet everyone's expectations.

This was a great start but it also meant that at each stop one of the kids would feel left out or bored, this is where having a theme really came in handy. Our ultimate focus was to go on tree identification trip. I purchased a book of trees at the local book store in the budget book section, and a photo album to place the mementoes of our trip. At each stop we made we would take pictures of the trees in the area, a sample leaf, and a bark scraping. So while every stop was centered on a specific child, Mom and Dad would take turns with the other children gathering our tree samples, while the other spent time watching over or sharing in the entertainment for the selected location.

Part of the fun of this trip was that everyone got involve from stat to finish. Once I had the final selection of events we would attend, we all sat around the kitchen table and made a map and schedule of how we would proceed and end up closest to home by the last stop. My three year old enjoyed this part using his crayons and making funny pictures of the family sitting around the table.

Once we had our map, supplies and enough snacks we hit the road. First stop the duck pond, (you have to take care of the little one first). We chased, fed, and walked like a duck! It was great fun.

Next we headed to the local video game arcade, we all joined in at first but my daughter soon lost interest and the two of us headed outside for round two of collecting our tree pictures and samples. About and hour later we were all ready for lunch, we made our move to the local mall and hit the food court. After a multi cultural lunch of Chinese, Italian, and good old American burgers and fries the boys and I headed outside for tree sample hunting part three. Mom and sissy toured the mall, my 14 year olds destination of choice.

At our agreed upon location and time the boys and I sat and waited another 30 minutes until arms full of shopping bags, the ladies smiled and said Sorry we are late, but we got all of you something too'. So who could be mad at that; definitely not me!

With the excitement of something new to play with for the boys and my daughter dying to call her friends and tell them about all the cool stuff she got we headed back to the car and made our way home. All in all a nice road trip for a Saturday. Plus we all spent the next day going through our book of trees trying to identify our samples, and putting together our photo album.

In closing all I can say is a long trips can be great, but sometimes a nice local road trip can be a quick fix to the summer time blues.

Learn more about this author, Erik Hewlett.
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