Earlier this month I took my family on a road trip down to the Gettysburg area for Independence Day. We had a great time — we watched fireworks on the battlefield, spent time with family, played games, ate great food, and more.
But I wanted to highlight a decision my wife and I made that helped make the time our family spent together more meaningful during the trip. We decided to be deliberately minimal with the gadgets we brought. Among the four of us — Becky, myself, and the two kids — we had two iPhones, a digital camera, and a Raspberry Pi.
The iPhones were for taking photos, communicating, turn-by-turn navigation — all the things you’d expect the average person to use an iPhone for on a road trip. The digital camera was for our oldest son to use during the trip. It’s a myFirst Camera Insta Wi, which isn’t a particularly great camera, but has the ability to print photos on thermal paper, allowing him to immediately have a physical copy of the photos he takes.
The Raspberry Pi was running RetroPie and was exclusively used for playing television shows through Kodi in the hotel room each morning while we were getting ready and each night before bed. We made use of Kodi’s Plex add-on quite a bit, but the internet connection in the hotel room was a bit spotty, so we often found ourselves just playing video that I had stored on it locally before we left. A lot of episodes of Paw Patrol, Perfect Strangers, and 90s era Supermarket Sweep.
Again, that was it. No iPads, no laptops, no game consoles.
A lot of other families would find themselves with an iPad, Nintendo Switch, or some other device in the car for each of their kids. My wife and I have always resisted that temptation, though. We know that it would make car rides easier in the short term, but avoiding that crutch will pay off tremendously in the long run.
The kids will have a better understanding of life outside of those devices and will have more opportunities to appreciate the countryside and develop their own ability to cure boredom without the use of electronics.
That doesn’t mean we went on a road trip empty handed, though. We brought books for each of our kids during the ride and a handful of small toys for the little one to hold on to.
But our secret weapon was the Magna-Doodle.
We brought two on the trip — one for each of our sons — and they were the perfect solution to boredom.
You can use a Magna-Doodle to create a temporary sign, draw a picture, write some text, practice math problems, learn the alphabet, play tic-tac-toe, play Pictionary, play Jackbox-style games, and more.
It’s literally a blank slate that can be whatever you want it to be. You could use a notebook alongside a pen, pencil, crayon, or marker, but with a Magna-Doodle, the pen is attached to the writing surface and you don’t have to worry about it being used on surfaces that it shouldn’t be — it only writes on the Magna-Doodle.
Of all the toys we own, the Magna-Doodle is one we always come back to and it never gets old — it scales with the age of the child like nothing else.
If you have children and don’t already own one, you should probably get them a Magna-Doodle.
