The intrepid road-tripper’s first-time guide to taking the kids

My excitement over finding ultra-discounted flights to Europe temporarily clouded the rational part of my brain that asks questions like, “Do I want to spend two weeks driving around the Western Balkans with a 5- and 7-year-old?” and “Should I check that I can take a rental car out of Greece before planning my road trip route?” As it turned out, the answer to both questions was a resounding yes.

Much to my children’s disappointment, I stuck to my old-fashioned belief that kids should watch the stunning Accursed Mountains rather than another episode of Gabby’s Dollhouse. But a lifetime of sharing the backseat of a minivan with two brothers, plus seven years of traveling with my own kids, helped me plan a 700-mile, four-country family road trip that was entertaining, exciting, and enjoyable. Below: the tips and tricks that made it work so well.

Just before we left, I realized my meticulously Google-mapped route sent us over a locals-only seasonal border between North Macedonia and Kosovo. I re-routed us into Albania, adding only a little time but an eighth hotel, and it cemented the need for an expert-level packing plan.

Children’s suitcases are like tiny, pressurized boxes of glitter: explosions of uncontrollable color that will never go back in. Unwilling to fork over an hour to hemming and hawing over the butterfly shirt versus unicorn pants and already dreaming the flood of rainbow dresses that would certainly be in my future, I devised a system.

Because kids don’t often re-wear clothes (thanks to spills, sweat, and the like), I directed mine to pack by outfit. Instead of packing 10 pairs of socks in one place, they put together zip-top baggies, each with a shirt, pants, socks, and underwear. We squeezed all the air out, like mini-compression bags, and lined them up in their suitcase. Every morning they grabbed the next bag, zipped their suitcase, and we headed out.

Beyond my standard travel-emergency and medical kit (bless the inventor of children’s melatonin), I keep a special piece of equipment on-hand for car sickness, in part because my older daughter needs constant physical reminders of why she shouldn’t read on winding roads.

Our must-pack is an emesis bag—we swiped ours on a visit to the ER but you can buy them online if you aren’t an urgent-care regular. The glorified barf bags come with a stiff plastic rim that makes it easier to hold in the uncertain pre-sickness moments and much harder to miss the opening of—key when you’re not looking to stain or stink up the car.

As an extremely goal-oriented person, I always just want to get to the next destination. But since my younger daughter often asks, “Are we there yet?” multiple times in the 12 blocks between home and school, I aimed to avoid any drive longer than two hours without an activity or meal break. That necessitated the many hotel changes, but looking for stops at odd junctures brought us the best parts of the trip: a completely deserted Roman archeological site in North Macedonia, a tour of a farm hidden inside a Serbian monastery in Kosovo, and a stay at a pasta-centric guesthouse in Albania.

While I took the kids on the donkey safari, my husband went mountain biking. In Prizren, I admired mosques and historic houses slowly and quietly while he took the girls shopping for souvenirs. And sometimes, we just took the kids to a playground and let them play for an afternoon without interruption. No family, no matter how close, can thrive without a little bit of space; building it into the itinerary preserves everyone’s sanity.

I describe my road-trip policy as screen-free, but that’s not entirely true: Both girls have their own digital cameras. While they recorded (and watched, and watched again) many videos of their own song contests in the car, they also captured the trip as they saw it: from low-to-the-ground, curious eyes.

When we got home, each kid picked their favorite photos from their own camera and ours, and I used Mixbook to help them put together memory books. We ordered two copies of each of them—one that they flip through and show friends, and one that we’re keeping in the attic in pristine condition for the future. The books transformed the trip into a tangible memory in a way that feels rare in the digital-photo era—I like to imagine them showing them to their own kids one day.

I’m not above bribery. When I needed little miss “refuses to pee before we leave the hotel” to use the bathroom or to motivate her sister from bed before noon, nothing works quite like promises of the twin pinnacles of European pediatric gastronomy.