Long Road Trips, Libraries, and Screen Time

I often see the question, what do people do on long road trips to avoid too much screen time for kids?  First, a disclaimer.  I have no personal druthers about screentime one way or the other.  I think whatever works best for each family works best.  We, missed the screentime issue by simple circumstance.  When the kids came, we were poor grad students; too poor to afford screens.  Consequently, we’ve just never had them.

So, what do we do on road trips without screens?  One of the answers is libraries!  (Actually an article in the New York Times a few days back, commenting on the rising popularity of libraries is what made me think of all this.)  On our latest cross-country road trip, our yearly two-week camping trip, we stopped at about a library a day.  They were delightful!  We go to read a little.  We used their free WiFi to keep up with communications as we went.    The kids read, they played with toys, they messed around on (shudder, hehehe), screens.  They also used the library tables to write post cards to their buddies.  Several of the libraries had book sales, so we walked out of the libraries with things to do till we reached the next library.  We also frequently talked to the librarians who were very helpful in providing information about their local towns.  (You know, things like where we could buy postcard stamps.)

Pinedale, WY Library

I think it also helped that were in almost exclusively small towns as we traveled.  We did that on purpose, and we did it by only taking state and US highways.  We spent perhaps twenty minutes on the interstate over the course of two weeks.  Most of the smaller towns had playgrounds within a block of their library.  The kids could go and run out their wiggles there.  Even better, the kids had choices they could make.  Sometimes the six and four year-old got to play on the playground while the eight year-old went in to read.  Sometimes, my partner and I wen tin to read as well.  We were pretty completely unworried about the kids being on the playgrounds by themselves.  We were traveling through the Western United States.  The scenery was gorgeous, and with one really odd exception, people were friendly everywhere we went.

As far as finding libraries went, we used our one smart phone for the most part.  We were in small enough towns that we could usually find playgrounds by the tried and true method of driving around.  There is an app for playgrounds though.  Winnie has a growing directory of playgrounds along with ratings and reviews.

So, for us, the road-trip without screens thing involved lots of little libraries and playgrounds that were delightful.  We didn’t make as many miles as we might have each day, but we had the luxury of not necessarily having ot care since were out on a camping trip anyway.  If you have the time, playground to playground, and library to library is a great way to travel!