Two hours forty, with everybody
The drive to my parents’ takes two hours forty without children. With two children and a fourteen-year-old dog it takes three and a half, and the extra fifty minutes are entirely under our control, which is the annoying part.
Two hours forty, says the map. The map has never met us.
With Nell, Rowan and Bramble it is three and a half, and for a long time I treated that extra fifty minutes as weather — a thing that happened to us. It isn’t. Almost all of it is decisions we make in the twenty minutes before we leave.
The stop
We stop at Wetherby. Always, every time, whether anybody has said they need to or not.
This is the single thing that changed the journey most, and it is counterintuitive if you are the sort of person who wants to make good time. We are that sort of person. We spent two years pushing on past the halfway point because everyone seemed fine, and then discovering at ninety-five minutes that someone was not fine at all, in a place with no services and no verge.
A stop you choose costs twenty minutes. A stop that is forced on you costs an hour, plus the rest of the journey, plus a conversation about it afterwards.
It is not a services stop, it’s a bit of grass. Fifteen minutes of running about does something for a three-year-old that no amount of in-car entertainment can, and Bramble, who is fourteen, needs it more than any of us.
Loading the boot
Tom’s rule, and he is right about it, so here it is in his words: load it in reverse order of when you’ll need it.
Wellies go in first, at the back, because they are needed at the other end. The bag with the pyjamas and the toothbrushes goes in last, on top, because that is the bag you need at half past eight when a child is asleep on your shoulder and you are trying to open a boot one-handed in the dark.
Before we did this, every arrival involved unloading the entire car onto my mother’s drive to find one thing.
The four in the front
Wipes, an empty carrier bag, water, and the blue rabbit.
Everything else can be in the boot. These four cannot, because the moment you need any of them is precisely the moment you cannot pull over, and I learned the carrier bag one on the A1 near Ferrybridge in a way I am not going to describe.
The rabbit’s position is non-negotiable and is checked before we leave the street. We have turned round for the rabbit. We would turn round again.
The nap theory
Leave after lunch, drive through the nap, arrive with a rested child. Everybody tells you this.
He slept for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes in a car seat completely replaced the two hours he would have had in a bed, and then he was awake, and could not get back to sleep, and was furious about it for the remaining two hours, and so, quietly, was I.
We leave straight after breakfast now. Everyone is at their best at nine in the morning and nobody is at their best at any point after four in the afternoon, so we spend the good hours in the car and the bad ones on my mum’s floor.
The screen
It works. That’s the problem — it works so well that you use it at ten past nine, and by Scotch Corner it has stopped working and you have nothing left.
It comes out after the stop now. Not before. On the train the timings are different, because there is more to look at.
Ninety minutes of talking, snacks, the number-plate game and a certain amount of whining, and then the film, and the film gets us home.
Things people email to ask
- How do you survive a long car journey with young children?
- Stop before anybody needs to. We take one break at a fixed point about halfway, whether or not anyone has asked, because a stop you choose costs twenty minutes and a stop you are forced into costs an hour and everybody’s mood. Beyond that: leave at a stated time, keep the essentials in the front where an adult can reach them, and ration the screen.
- Is it better to drive during nap time?
- It was not for us. The theory is lovely and what actually happened was a twenty-minute car nap that replaced a two-hour bed nap, followed by two hours of a furious three-year-old who could not get back to sleep. We now leave straight after breakfast, when everyone is at their best, and accept that the last half hour will be bad.
- How often should you stop on a long drive with kids?
- Once every ninety minutes to two hours is about right, and the important part is that it is scheduled rather than reactive. Ours is at Wetherby, roughly halfway, and it happens even when everybody says they are fine at Wetherby. Fifteen minutes on a bit of grass resets a three-year-old in a way that nothing available inside the car does.
- What should you keep in the front of the car?
- Wipes, an empty carrier bag, water, and whatever the comfort object is. Everything else can be in the boot; those four cannot, because the moments they are needed are exactly the moments you cannot pull over. We learned the carrier bag the hard way on the A1 and I do not want to write about it.
Printable
The car list
What goes in the car before a long drive to the grandparents’, in the order we’ve learned to load it. Written after the time we got to Scotch Corner without the dog’s water bowl.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Car sickness: what we carry now
Two children, one dog, one A1. We have had four incidents in three years and the fourth one taught us more than the first three, mostly because it happened forty minutes from the nearest anything.
Staying at my mum’s, and the travel cot years
Three nights in a house that is not childproofed, with a three-year-old who sleeps badly anywhere new, and a grandmother who would like to help and mostly cannot be told how.
Presents for people who live two hours away
We see my parents perhaps eight times a year, and for a long time our presents were an attempt to make up the difference — bigger, posted, apologetic. The thing that helped was giving something that produced phone calls instead of parcels.
Comments
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