Car games for grandchildren on 5 hour journey

When my children were around 10 yrs old there were not I-pads/mobile phones in those days, we would check number plates starting with number 1 then number 2 and so on. Playing I Spy was a favourite, also listening to tapes. We would travel from Wiltshire to Plymouth, sometimes a 5 hour journey, M4 and M5 were not built then.

My daughter and I took 5 eleven year olds out for a day trip, they all had tablets and played with them . it was quite noisy at times but they had a great day. We also had frequent stops and went Llama tracking. It was for !y granddaughters delayed birthday trip.

Thank you so much to all of you and your ideas. It took me back to over 50 years ago when me and my 2 older brothers were each given a car registration booklet. The last 2 letters of a vehicle's reg plate identified what part of the country the vehicle was from. I remember it so well and we were all so chuffed to tick off the rarer ones. How times have changed. Luckily neither of my 2 grandchildrem suffer from car sickness so they are well into their tablets. I think even kids of today still like a pen and paper and a bit of a giggle with Nanny. My two still like actual board games and messing about with charades and silly games. Im going to cherish the next 2 or 3 years because once they get to secondary school they wont want to play with Nanny anymore. Then I'll have to wait till their children come along if I can manage to live that long.!

Nannaandgrampy - can I come on a long journey with you??

Top Trumps, loads of subjects to choose from, simple fun, no mess, educational too, never fails !

If they like drawing, my DGSs aged 6 and 9 enjoy “copying” pictures from their old reading books (peppa pig, the gruffalo for example). They then compare their pictures and have a good giggle

Unabridged quality stories pass the time well especially when interspersed with some of the games above. We did up to 12 hour journeys in a totally crammed car in this way in the days before iPads. Stories. Games. Food.

My daughter's family drive 6 hours a couple of times a year to visit friends and also to holiday. They use the same things/ methods as we did including audio books plus the iPads. Reading in the car (or drawing/ writing) makes their oldest sick but a film isn't so bad.

Food! Yes. This is key.Our five ate through mountains of it on a long journey. Keep it with you so they don't know the surprises you have packed.

Make lots of different sandwiches. I used to wrap these individually in "tin" foil and actually labelled them as to contents. This was an interesting concept and made each one special (apparently).

Offer only one or two things at a time so each has novelty value! Offer at regular intervals.

And make sure some are juicy such as baby tomatoes or sticks of cucumber.

Oh, and be brutally honest if asked "are we nearly there yet".
Say "if we split the journey into ten pieces we have done one of them." If we split the journey into 10 pieces we have done 6 of them".
5 hours isn't so bad if you have a break in the middle.

Oh yes. Top trumps. ?

I recommend goody bags, full of cheap bits and pieces. (Pound shops are sometimes a good source.) Colouring books, crayons, a little book if reading doesn't make them carsick, and small toys. You can put snacks in there too.

Kids' music CDs and audio books are also good and will sometimes lull them off to sleep.

Oh gosh. We’ve done regular 10-12 hour car journeys over the years with little preparation. Just bunged them in the car and off we went! When personal tape players became a thing we had those and they took whatever small toys they were currently playing with to amuse them. Reading was dodgy territory as some of them got car sick from that.

Two of mine fell asleep as soon as you started the engine so that was a bonus. In fact, even as adults, if they’re not driving they still fall asleep!

I suffer from car sickness if I’m not driving so doing anything that involved me turning round was a no-no, they really had to amuse themselves. They were all very well-behaved, looking back on it, and luckily, their own children now seem to enjoy long journeys too.

Maybe I made my sandwich efforts sound a chore SueDomin!
It really wasn't.

Story tapes and food, singing and I-spy type games passes hours.
And then, as you say, they do all sleep for a chunk!

I don't think 5 hours is very long.

We'd scarcely get down the road before the DC would be asking if they could start on the food!

NotSpaghetti - I agree about the breaking the journey down comment, and being honest. I related 6 hour journeys with my young son to his school day eg if you were at school it would be playtime now, but we won't get there until siesta time and so on.

Recognition of car make badges, Ford, VW, Jaguar, Rolls Royce, Nissan, Skoda. Grand son mediocre but grand daughter an ace recogniser, was the younger too. Greenwich Uni has a course for these supreme recognisers, very valued by the police, you never know you may be nurturing a future star.They get trained and will spot faces of miscreants easily in huge crowds. Probably would have been supreme hunters in days gone by. Posh cars got premium points too, rare ones too.

I purchased some stories by David Walliams on cd and they loved them.
They also played i-spy,travel ludo/snakes and ladders and chess.

I sometimes ferried Brownies and Guides to various places, including the seaside. A part of the journey always involved singing round robin ‘guide songs’ such as ‘Oh you’ll never go to heaven…’ or something yucky like ‘I think I’ll go and eat worms’. All guaranteed to get everyone singing and laughing. Or Ronald Dahl kids stories for the same reason. For longer distances I always stopped after an hour to an hour and a half, preferably somewhere with a playground, just to let off the excitement and have a snack, everyone settled down for the journey then.

Tablets are the go to in-car entertainment nowadays. Have played the "spot the ?" eg red car, green lorry, car with dog in back, number plate with a certain letter in it. Winner if one round gets to choose the topic for the next.

We used to play with our children and grandchildren what we called the ABC game. You select a category, say food or if older children, more specifically fruit or vegetables. Starting with youngest with letter A and then we all have a turn before we go on to B. If the young ones can't answer we give them a clue and if they still can't answer we pass to the next person.

That is so true Callistemon !!

If we are doing a drive off the motor way we play the pub game.

Each child takes turns and count the number of legs on a Pub sign. For instance The White Hart would be 4. Everyone wants The Cricketers lol

Its fun for slightly bigger kids.

Oh, that's a good one.

DH once tried to keep to a steady 70mph on the motorway and got them counting how many cars, lorries we overtook and how many overtook us!

The thing to do now is to make sure you have plenty of food an drink because the traffic could be crawling at 20mph or stopped altogether.

We regularly drove from the Midlands down to Cornwall when our children were young.
One popular way to pass the time and judge the length of the journey was to give them the big AA atlas and let them count the numbers as we passed each motorway junction, from single figures where we joined the M5 all the way to junction 31 at Exeter.

When my children were to young for eyespy we played can you see,my 4 year old asked could we see a duck house,after many guesses we turned around and it was a pub called the swan with big picture on the side..I suppose you had to be there to find it so amusing

Apricity

Oh, I do so remember the very, very long drives in Australia playing I Spy. After one excruciatingly drawn out game as we all tried to guess what started with 's' it was finally revealed as 'window'. When it was pointed out that window did not start with 's' we were told that 'it can if I want it to.'

I so love this!

Who's the first to see?
Who's the first to see a red door (Car or house)
Who's the first to see a brown horse. Etc Etc

Ideal for children who can't spell, my DDs played this for years when passengers

The AA has as nice little list
www.theaa.com/european-breakdown-cover/driving-in-europe/car-games

I like the look of this one

7. The Number Plate Game
This is a great game for inspiring creativity rather than competitiveness. Kids love making up stories and this game should really spark their imaginations. Everyone chooses a passing car and memorises the last three letters of the number plate. Now make up a story using the letters as inspiration. Use the first letter to decide the name of the main character, the second letter could be an item or an animal in the story, and the third letter can provide inspiration for what the character’s doing. If you’re driving through Europe, get the kids to look out for and keep a tally of plates from different countries.