Traveling without technology

We put over 120,000 miles on my minivan since we bought it nine years ago. We drove it all over California and up to Washington State and back again. Once, when a friend was visiting from Australia, we traveled over 3,000 We road trip. It’s what we do.

Sure, families travel all over. Big deal, right? Add this information to these miles: every one was logged without technology. No GPS, no hand-held-electronic game equipment for the kids, and no DVD or Blu-ray player in the car.

I know! Shocking!

Technology can get in the way of family time

My van is old, so it doesn’t have any of this equipment built in, and our kids don’t own hand-held electronic games. Of course they want them, but we have managed to steer clear of these items. Our reason is simple: we like to spend the time in the car together, not plugged into a device to pass the time.

Here’s what’s odd about this tech-free zone in our car: we all love technology. I work in Social Media and have my own blog. My husband plays video games with the kids all the time, and he can write computer code if he needs to. Our oldest son is a member of an on-line community, and we are a Panasonic LiHD family.

Technology changed our lives tremendously in the last two years. We just don’t have any of it in my car. I drool over the awesome new vans on the market with their fancy Blu-ray and dashboard electronics, but our van runs beautifully and we can’t justify buying a new one. So I drive without state-of-the-art electronics, and that’s okay.

Sure, there are times when a movie would be convenient, and make a trip more bearable. The most agonizing trip was the journey to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving when a four-hour drive turned into a seven-and-a-half hour crawl with every other holiday traveler in North America, it seemed. On that trip I would have given up an eyeball for a DVD player in the car. Now we figure if we can survive that, we can survive any road trip without technology!

How your family can benefit from a technology time out

Here’s what I know we have gained from all these miles logged without electronics in my minivan: my boys have seen the state of California. They know when we are travelling north or south on the 101. We look out the windows of our van and talk about everything we see. We tell stories, play games, read, listen to books and comedians on CD, and sing songs – badly, and out of key.

We also get uncomfortable, irritable, tired, and on each others nerves, but with the bickering, we learn about each other. We learn tolerance, patience, and sometimes it’s best just to be quiet. We become uninterested in the landscape we’ve seen hundreds of times, but then we notice something new along the side of the road that wasn’t there before. Or we make a wrong turn and see a beautiful wrought-iron gate we would have missed if we knew where we were going. It’s all part of the journey.

The next time you take a road trip, see if you can do it from beginning to end without the technology we rely on to pass the time. We always say, “we can watch movies at home, but only on a road trip can you make those ‘would you stop touching me!’ life-long memories.” Give it a try, but go ahead and keep a favorite Blu-ray handy – just in case.

Happy trails!

When Eileen isn’t driving around in technology from the year 2001, she is the Chief Mom Connector of Mom Central. You can read about her family adventures on her own blog at calandroclan.com and find her @MomCentralChat and @calandro5.

Eileen Calandro