I'm sure many Moms can relate--- getting out of the house feels AMAZING when you are raising little ones. It has seriously helped my walking habit explode. As long as it is not unreasonably cold, or raining, I am loading my little nugget into his stroller and clocking us some steps. For some time, that has been the bulk of our traveling-- but my son turned 1 and it was waaay past time to get out and about again!
Hubby and I wanted to plan a low-cost trip to start to explore what traveling with another human would feel like. We decided to visit good friends in North Carolina who recently purchased a big beautiful farm in the area. GPS told us it would be over an 8 hour drive. Our little man hasn't done a drive longer than 45 minutes.. so we knew it would be an adventure...
We decided we would make the drive at night. Less traffic and HOPEFULLY the baby would sleep. We were coming from NJ so we wanted to avoid high travel times in the DC area which are notoriously awful. We knew it would also mean we would have a very tired first day.. but a reasonable price to pay if we could get to NC without the baby screaming.
Well...lucky us.. it worked like GANGBUSTERS!
We left around 6:30pm and arrived around before 2am. We were TIRED.. but the baby slept almost the WHOLE time! It was a TOTAL victory. Our little guy was wide awake once we woke him up to go inside-- which wasn't ideal because mommy and daddy were DEFINITELY ready for bed.. but he settled down soon after.
The next morning, we enjoyed waking up to the sunshine, meeting the baby chicks and resident chickens, snuggling their dog, riding around their property, peeking into the greenhouse and more. While we were there we attended a bluegrass festival and even took a ride over to Raleigh. If we were to do it again, we would have moved the Raleigh visit on a different day since it meant a lot of car time before we headed home at 6pm on our last day.
The drive home started bumpy. Naturally 30 minutes into our drive, the baby pooped and we had to pull over to change his diaper. It took him a while to settle in this drive, but eventually the repetitive driving noises lulled him to sleep and all and all, we had a decent drive home. He did wake up when we stopped for gas-- those gas station lights are bright and he wasn't feeling it! But hey-- gotta do what you gotta do!
For our awake moments in the car, we had plenty of snacks, bottles (we are just starting to wean but a long car ride wasn't going to be the place for that!), small toys, an electronic word book, and mom's fully charged phone for episodes of Elmo and Cocomelon. I sat in the back with the baby the full ride to attend to anything he needed for the trip.
For our trip, we made sure to bring a travel high chair, stroller, plenty of diapers & wipes, sippy cups, formula (it was a quick trip and we didn't want to need to hit up a store too even though we could have bought those items there), pacifiers, a few toys, baby blanket, sunscreen, and then of course, many changes of clothes including layers for unpredictable weather. We had everything we needed for our trip!
We would DEFINITELY do this trip again- and driving at night was the winning strategy for this adventure!
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