I really like these thoughts by Allen Webster. Allen is a friend and a GREAT writer. He also has one of the most awesome families I know. This blog is motivating.
Why we keep choosing road trips…
Somewhere between mile marker 200 and the third gas station snack run, something happens… your family becomes a team.
Researchers at Emory University spent years studying what holds families together. Their finding… kids who know their family’s story, the hard seasons and how you made it through, but also the wins, the quirks, the “this is just who we are” stuff, grow up more resilient. Higher self esteem. Lower anxiety. That held true even when families weren’t especially close to begin with. And a road trip is basically eight hours of built in storytelling time if you let it be.
We try to be intentional about it. A short family devotional a few miles in. Questions we wouldn’t think to ask at home. Inside jokes we let live on for months. A little boredom we don’t rush to fix.
Scripture tells us to talk with our kids about what matters “when you sit at home and when you walk along the road” (Deuteronomy 6:7). That verse comes right after Moses tells parents to love God with everything they have and then pass that down to their children, not through one big lecture, but woven into ordinary moments, walking, waking up, lying down. Turns out he should have included road-tripping in the Tahoe too.
That’s the whole idea, isn’t it… not one big sit down conversation, just life happening together, mile after mile. My friend, and author/speaker, Jim Burns calls it “the power of being there.” Not the trip itself, not the mountains or the campground, just the fact that you showed up and stayed in the car for eight hours with nowhere else to be. Kids read presence as proof they matter, long before they can put words to it. A road trip hands you days of that in a row, no rushing off to the next thing.
Relationships don’t always need a big planned moment to deepen either. Sometimes it’s just a dumb joke that becomes a whole family tradition. For us it was cemeteries. Every town, every single one we passed, our oldest son would say in his best groaning dad joke voice… “I hear people are dying to get in there.” Or it’s the pure chaos of someone announcing they need a bathroom the second you’re in the absolute middle of nowhere, no exit for thirty miles, everybody laughing and panicking at the same time. Connection sneaks in through the easy stuff. You don’t have to force it, you just have to be in the car long enough for it to happen.
None of it has to be complicated. It’s the power of being there.
You don’t need a two week trip to build this into your family.
A drive to your Aunt and Uncle’s house in works.
So does the commute to school.
Put the phones down, ask a real question, and let the family story start writing itself.
That’s the bond we’re all really after.
Not just where we went. Who we became on the way there.