Traveling with a variety of generations can be fun and interesting. It can also be a bit frustrating as your aging parent deals with your grandchild’s uber-exuberance and as your grandkids adjust themselves to great-grandpa’s slower pace. This becomes especially apparent in a long drive by car. My senior mom, young grandson, and I discovered some fun “tricks of the trade” that helped make a long drive shorter and more interesting.

We had both the luxury and the need to take things slower due to simplified schedules and arthritis issues. We wound up stopping about every 1 1/2 – 2 hours giving us a chance to stretch our legs, head for the restroom, and fill up the driver (me ) with more caffeine!

I don’t know if this would be true for everyone, but on our particular route, we discovered that there was a Wal-Mart close to the freeway every time we got off! Each Wal-mart had nice restrooms – one even had a delightful bouquet of fresh flowers! They all had a restaurant of some type in them – either McDonald’s or Subway. They had fun craft sets, including one that kept my grandson busily working all day in the car as well as a new DVD movie he enjoyed – on sale. We even had fun picking out a few more Harvest decorations. All of this at Wal-Mart’s wonderful budget-friendly prices (they are another of my favorite ways to save money) AND they had plenty of caffeine to keep me perkily driving on.

At the end of a very long day of driving and “Wal-mart hopping,” my grandson commented that it had been a fun day that went really fast. My senior mom totally agreed. Now that’s a success in anyone’s Sandwich Generation book!