edinburgh to glocs for xmas - 2 under 4 in the car - any advice on road-trip-from-hell-avoidance, please?

[MorvernCallar]

DH and I are planning to drive with DDs - aged 2 and 4 - to my parents in Gloucestershire for Christmas. It'll be the longest car journey (by hours) that we've done together and I'm thinking we should stop overnight on the way there and back to avoid 10 hours-on-the-m6 hellish meltdowns.

Does anyone please have any hints as to where best to break the journey / stay overnight? We'll be heading for the m6 and then the m5 by Birmingham. Or are we being wimps - might we be better off trying to do the drive in one go (just stopping at services as necessary) - which on a good day would take at least 6/7 hours.

What we did last year was I took the children on the plane and DH drove down in vile snowy conditions, but that was a nightmare really, and this year the plane is so expensive because DD2 is now 2. Seemed like a good idea to try a different tack, but the prospect of the car journey is filling me with horror ... your wisdom and experience would be much appreciated. Thank you.

DVD player if you can source one, plus Peppa Pig, Timmy Time, etc. That ought to buy you a couple of hours. The last monster trip we did (Sheffield to Edinburgh) we got up at stupid o'clock (4am I think) and put sleeping kids into the car and did a decent chunk of it with them both sleeping.

you did it last year?

isn't it time they came to you?!!

i like the dvd tip - we might try that. thank you. the 4am idea would, i'm sure, backfire horribly as they'd both inevitably wake up and scream the place down (we forget to have those lovely sort of kids who can be moved when asleep, worst luck).

and yes it is time they came to us, but that suggestion was met by a stony silence and i can't be doing with testing diplomatic relations right now ...

and so i've booked a place to stay in lancaster, which means we'll only have 170 miles along the m6 on the friday before christmas to do - think we'll be arriving chez parents slightly frazzled. ho hum.

As a kid I was taken from Yorkshire to Cornwall for holidays, not as many motorways then so a long journey, this is what my mum did for two liitle ones

We went to bed as normal, we were carried out of bed still in pyjamas into the car, I have no idea whether it was 10pm or 5am. In those days there were no seatbelts so we laid down on the backseat - obviously not a good idea.

We continued to sleep, or went back to sleep - I note you said yours would wake - if the car is warm, quiet and they are still in PJs then you might get them back to sleep.

When we woke up we would stop at a reststop / cafe / garage / motorway service area and have breakfast and get dressed.

We then played car games, yours might be a bit young, not sure.

Sometimes we would have an A4 envelope with a list of things, when we saw one of the things on the list, mum checked, and if we were right we could open one of the small gifts, individually wrapped inside the envelope.

The list had things like

a red car
a boat
a cat

you get the idea. I know yours are too young to read but maybe an, "if you spot a red car you can open a present" type thing would keep them busy.

The presents were things like a packet of sweets, a notepad and pencil, the kind of things you put in kids birthday goody bags.

Drive overnight - get in the car at normal bedtime, they will soon fall asleep - probably sleep all the way there.

And there will be the smallest amount of traffic possible.

OH and I spent years of driving up and down motorways at Christmas to visit family. When DD was born we just told both families that we had done our duty by doing the visiting and if they wanted to see us at Christmas they could come to us. It wasn't offered as a choice. I think you should put your foot down and tell your family that the children aren't good travellers. My sister and her family don't travel to see us at Christmas any more because the roads are just horrendously busy at that time of year and it spoils Christmas for them. Likewise, we don't visit them at Christmas for the same reason.

sashh - your mum sounds like a superstar (me and my brother used to sleep together on the back seat too) - i'll try some of her ideas. plus a big tuppperware of ham sandwiches ...

bunbaker - i agree with you entirely. i'm not really sure why we're expected to do the travelling, it seems absurd, but there's been tension a-plenty the past few years between me and my parents about visiting and i can't bear to open old wounds ... it's not just the travel, the kids get stressed out at my parents' cus they can't be left to their own devices in what must be the least child-friendly house imaginable. daft, eh?

I do a trip down to my mum's about twice a year. She's in Ross on Wye, we're near Dundee. It's not all that bad - takes 7 hours with one big stop (we have a four and a one year old) at Tebay services. Surely it can't be that much longer to Gloucester? I don't take a DVD player, the one time we did use one, my elder daughter went postal when it ran out of batteries, plus I'm old fashioned in some ways and think it's healthy to be able to deal with boredom/inactivity.

When my oldest was the same age as my youngest we tried it overnight - didn't work at all, she hardly slept on the way down and then had the hugest meltdown ever at 2am when we got there from tiredness and over-excitement. Don't think anyone got any sleep that night. But I do like to start early if I can - by 6am.

Forgot to say, it's funny the things that do and don't bother different people. There's a possibility I might be taking two relatively short plane trips on my own with both children in a couple of months - that makes me far more nervous than the idea of one much longer car journey. It's what you're used to, I suppose.