We travel a lot in the Hectic Household. We travel for sports, leisure, work, and to visit each other. Being in the middle of the US means that drives of nine hours still only get us 1/4 of the way across the country. With one daughter in Boulder, CO and another in Rochester, MN…those 9 hours drives are fairly commonplace. Another daughter went to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN for four years. That meant one-way drives of 12 hours. She then moved to New Jersey…21 hours away. Subsequently another daughter enrolled in Maine Maritime Academy for her university work…a whopping 29 hours by car.
Those times are driving times, they don’t include stops for food, gas, restroom. All that driving means that we’re in our cars a lot.
I’ve been thinking about what we should have packed in our cars for these trips. We don’t drive the newest cars (my van is perilously close to 200,000 miles), so repair gear is essential. Weather is often a factor when we drive, so we need safety gear. Food, spare charging cables, tow straps…we have a smattering of everything imaginable in some of the cars.
And that’s the real problem. I’m not sure that any of our cars (including my well-stocked van) actually have all the essentials on this list. There are really four classes of situations that I’m considering here:
- Emergencies
- Everyday
- Sports
- Party “Emergencies”
The last one may take a bit of explaining. With eight kids, we’ve spent a lot of time hauling kids to other kids’ birthday parties. Because this is the Hectic Household, our well-laid plans to purchase appropriate birthday gifts never seem to happen in an orderly way. Far too often (oh, let’s just arbitrarily say 80% of the time…or more) we’re rushing to the store on the way to said birthday party. It gets tiring (not to mention really expensive) to have to also buy wrapping paper, tape, scissors, etc. along with the gift. So we’ve created an emergency party pack. It doesn’t contain actual gifts, although I’ve considered that idea, but it does contain all the supplies necessary to prep and wrap almost any reasonable gift in the car on the way to the party. We’ve gotten really good at cutting, taping, and writing gift notes…having done it for so many years!
Below you’ll find four checklists that you can use to outfit your car. You probably didn’t expect the Emergency Party checklist, so consider that a bonus. The other three are pretty boring, but probably contain an item or two that you hadn’t thought of. I’ve given out similar lists to my kids so they could outfit their cars, but I know my kids. They’ll look at the list and check off a few items…and decide to stop. I figured if I shared these lists with my broader blogging audience, then somebody might find them useful. You never know, my kids might even take the hint. Actually, I may have just created the Christmas shopping list for the kids who have cars!
Checklists
