During the 2019 summer holidays, we travelled down to Cornwall for the week with the kids which is a five, six-hour journey from where we live. Unfortunately, an hour into our return journey, David’s cambelt blew as we were driving which instantly wrote the car off leaving us stranded for 3-4 hours which sucked. However, it gave me a great idea for a blog post .
Before you leave:
- Make sure you have breakdown cover and it’s up to date.
- Get yourself a Dash cam to record your journey in case of any accidents, we used a Nextbase 422GW*.
- Make sure you have a spare Tyre in your boot ( depending on the age of your car, newer car’s don’t come with a spare Tyre) or get yourself a Tyre inflator ( we also experience a slow puncture whilst we were there and used our Ring tyre inflator* which did the job)
- Check your oil and water.
Handy tips for the journey:
- Go to the loo before you leave and take regular breaks to stretch their legs and for more toilet breaks.
- We fully charged our power banks and took plenty of USB leads with us- Kept both our phones fully charged and managed to fully charge the kid’s tablets more than once.
- Fully charge the tablets the night before you leave.
- I packed the kids a backpack each which included a blanket, sunglasses, colouring book, notebook, colouring pencils and their headphones.
- Pack plenty of snacks.
- We were sent Hydro flasks* each for our family holiday which are absolutely amazing and kept our drinks nice and cold for hours. We filled them up at every stop and I packed a little Squash’d concentrate bottle which made up to 20 drinks.
- Take toilet roll and a portable potty if you still have one just in case they are busting but there’s nowhere to stop for miles.
- Play car games like eye-spy, guess the song by humming, spot the yellow car, alphabet memory game etc
- Pack lots of their favourite Cd’s or a USB stick with them on if you do not have a Cd player in the car like us.
- Pack spare clothes, plastic bags, alcohol gel and tissues and keep them close in case of any travel sickness.
I was gifted the items with an * next to them in return for inclusion in this post