by Chris Moore

Created on: November 09, 2008   Last Updated: November 16, 2008

You can plan everything down to the last detail for your family's long-distance vacation, be it to Disneyland, Yellowstone Park or the Grand Canyon. But even after organizing all the suitcases and ice chests, mapping out the rest stops and calculating the gas mileage, you may have forgotten one important thing:

How are you going to keep the kids occupied for the entire trip?

Let's face it: Young children don't often have long attention spans. And if you don't make sure they have things to do in that car, you'll have to deal with unpleasant kids for several miles. And that will make your trip seem even longer.

You can always solve this by stopping at the drugstore or Toys-R-Us before leaving town and heading right to the games section. You could find plenty of travel games for the kids there, including electronic games at some pretty affordable prices. Anything that resembles the video games they like playing, or maybe the game shows they watch, should help keep them going.

Of course, you can't go wrong with a simple pack of cards. From Old Maid to Go Fish, your kids surely know plenty of card games they can play over and over again.

You definitely don't want any games that come with small pieces if they're going to be used in the car. A bumpy road or a quick turn can send those pieces flying around and, in a car that's probably tightly packed, that will ruin everything quickly.

There are, however, other very simple games that require no purchases at all the type that you'll interact with and are designed to stimulate their creativity and imagination. There's the old alphabet game, "Going Out West," where everyone in the car rotates around, coming up with some crazy two-word item they're going to take on their trip out west. The first person starts with the letter A ("I'm going to take an Angry Aardvark"). The next person repeat everything said before in alphabetical order, finishing with something for the next unused letter.

Then there are the singing games, like Raffi's classic song, "Down By the Bay." Remember that one, where every verse must end in a rhyming nonsense phrase? ("Did you ever see llamas eating their pajamas?") This one always brings laughs for the little kids.

The simplest game may be the license plate game. Have the kids watch the cars you drive past on the road and mark down the state of each license plate. The object is to try and get all 50 states for the course of the trip. This may also be the easiest interactive game for you because the kids do all the work while you can still focus on driving.

The primary goal is finding games that will keep your kids thinking and/or focused for an extended period of time. If their minds start wandering, that's when they get bored and restless. Anything that constantly keeps their attention and applies to their imaginations will make their trip a lot more fun and yours as well.

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