I Plan My Family Road Trips Around Walmarts — and You Should Too

Family road trips are a time-honored tradition: one of the true parenting milestones that everyone dreams about from the first time they feel their unborn child kick in their belly. Excited first-time parents look at each other with euphoric idealism usually reserved for stoners and religious fanatics. Giddy with anticipation, they plan Summer vacations with the kids nestled quietly in the back seat, the dog sticking his head out the back window, ears flapping in the breeze, and the luggage piled neatly on the roof rack of the station wagon. Everyone is happy. Everyone is smiling. And absolutely no one is throwing up.

Is there anything more distinctly American than baseball, apple pie, and overly ambitious road trips?

Unfortunately, as with most fantasies, the reality of the family road trip is a whole lot louder, smellier, and more unpredictable. In reality, the luggage is spilling out of the trunk and down below the children's feet because somebody decided that the extra drag from the roof rack would cost approximately $37.50 more in gas money and add at least 12 minutes of extra driving time. The dog is burrowed into a small gap between the pack-n-play, the bin of toys that the children can't possibly live without, the six grocery bags full of irreplaceable snack foods, three coolers full of chicken nuggets, and at least 12 suitcases.

One of the bags of goldfish crackers has fallen open, and the dog is covered in powdered cheese, suffering debilitating stomach cramps, and farting like a foghorn. The oldest child has his nose buried in his iPad, can't possibly hear or acknowledge anyone's attempts at conversation, but loudly objects to the toxic cloud wafting up from the cargo area of the car. The middle child gets car sick, and the smell is not helping. He has only eaten gummy worms and ice cream sandwiches for the past three days, and his skin has turned a sort of peaked green, which matches the dingy leather of the boiling hot car seats.

And the baby is crying. It feels like the baby has been crying for days. She fell asleep for a few minutes halfway between Kansas and Missouri, but that was the exact moment the dog chose to wake up from his junk-food-induced coma and howl like a Timberwolf in the full moon. No one can breathe. No one can move. And there's at least two hours of driving left before your next planned break. Two excruciating, ear-piercing, nose-plugging, migraine-inducing hours.

This is the reality of family road trips.

Don't you just wish you could go back and slap those naïve parents-to-be across the face with a dirty diaper and tell them to get used to spending a lot of time at home?

But it turns out the problem isn't the road trip itself, but rather the unrealistic expectations of the perfect family vacation. Children are going to whine. They're going to get bored, even if you packed a hundred activities. They're going to get car sick and probably throw up at the worst possible moment. They're going to eat fried food and gummy snacks until it seems they'll never poop again. And then when they do, you won't want to be anywhere in the vicinity for at least an hour. And if you're lucky, they'll wait until you find a place to pull over first. If you're lucky.

However, as long as you go into the experience knowing these things and expecting at least 50 other as-yet-unidentified disasters along the way, then family road trips can still be fun. The trick is to set your goals low. Don't try and drive six hours a day with small children. Don't pick museums and tourist sites along the way as entertainment or driving breaks. Your kids don't want to see the country's third largest ball of yarn. Turns out, no one does.

What you want is a place where you can stop on short notice, somewhere that has clean bathrooms, functioning air-conditioning, novel and unspoiled snacks, fresh, vomit-free clothes, shoes to replace the ones the oldest child threw out the window to see if they bounced on the highway, shampoo to clean the cheese off the dog, and headphones to block out the sound of the crying baby. You need somewhere that no one cares if your kids run, half-dressed, through the toy aisles, kicking balls and pressing buttons on every battery-powered item they can get their hands on.

As terrible as it sounds, you need to plan your family road trips, not around once-in-a-lifetime landmarks — there will be a time again in your life for things like that, but it's not now — but rather around the most conveniently located Walmart Superstores. Because let's face it: your kids will probably have gone feral by the end of the third day on the road. They're unwashed, unfed, and unhinged. But no matter what they do, they won't be the worst behaved people to patron a Walmart. Not even close.

Walmart is like an oasis for cooped up children and cracked parents. And the best part is, there's one right off the highway approximately every 30 minutes throughout the entire country. God bless America.

Don't believe me? Give it a try on your next family vacation. Put away the fancy guides to old-fashioned road trips, turn off National Lampoon's Vacation, and quit expecting perfection. Instead, embrace the chaos, the noise, and the 13th pit stop that day.

Don't put so much pressure on yourself and your family to have a textbook trip. Life with small children isn't about perfection; it's about survival. And when it comes to survivalists, there's no better place to gather than a Walmart. So let yourself stop and smell the roses from time to time.

I hear Walmart has a lovely florist section.