The Family Road Trip Packing List That Prevents 90% of the Meltdowns

A long car journey with children is not a test of patience. It is a logistics problem, and logistics problems can be solved in advance, on a kitchen table, while everyone is calm.

The front-seat bag (the one that matters)

This is the bag that stays within arm's reach of an adult. Everything in it exists because you will need it at seventy miles an hour with nowhere to pull over.

• Wet wipes. More than you think. Then more.
• A roll of kitchen towel and two carrier bags — one for rubbish, one for the emergency you can imagine.
• Snacks in individual portions, pre-divided. Handing back a family bag of crisps in a moving car is a decision you make once.
• A refillable water bottle each, half-frozen the night before.
• Travel sickness bags. Even if nobody gets travel sick. Especially then.
• A complete change of clothes for every child under seven, in a sealed bag, reachable without opening the boot.
• Painkillers, plasters, antihistamine, sun cream.
• Charging cables that actually work, tested before you leave.

Timing beats everything

Two schools of thought, and you must pick one and commit:

1. Drive at nap time or overnight. Leave at 4 a.m. with children in pyjamas. They sleep for three hours and you have covered half the journey before anyone asks anything.
2. Drive in the morning after a proper breakfast. Everyone is fed, rested and at their best. This is better for children who do not sleep in cars, which is most children over six.

What does not work is leaving at 3 p.m., which is the exact moment every human under ten is at their worst.

Break every two hours, properly

Not a petrol-station stop with everyone strapped back in after four minutes. Fifteen minutes minimum, out of the car, running. A tired child in a car seat is an unhappy child; a child who has just sprinted around a picnic area for a quarter of an hour will give you another two hours of peace. The time you "lose" is repaid with interest.

The screen question

A long car journey is not the hill to die on. Download everything in advance — motorway signal is a myth — and set an honest expectation: screens after the first stop, off for the last hour so nobody arrives fried and headachey. Bring headphones. Bring a spare pair, because one will break.

Games that survive contact with real children

• Twenty questions. Endlessly renewable.
• The alphabet game, spotting each letter on signs in order.
• "Would you rather," which gets weirder and better the longer it goes on.
• An audiobook the whole car actually likes. This is the single best investment in a long drive and it is worth spending twenty minutes choosing well.