Monday Musings: Audiobooks make long travel easier

When you are in a blended family, you often have a lot more traveling to do then the rest of the families around you. For us, that travel means going to La Grange Park, IL right outside Chicago a minimum of once a month. Now in order for us to make this trip and have all the children for the weekend, we must do two round trips in three days time. That calls for a lot of travel time with a car full of kids. Thankfully, they have all been doing this trip regularly for most of their lives, so it's usually not to much of a hassle.
It does however get boring, often, to sit for just shy of three hours in a car with not much to do. The "new" car we got last year does have a built in DVD player, but the picture quality is shoddy, the speakers are going out, and if it's loud enough for them to hear in the third row, it's blaring to us up front. We don't have the money to get them all tablets or such devices, and toys are fun but there is only so much room to play.
So we often do audio books while we drive. We have found that this makes the time pace much smoother and quicker than movies or music. It's not distracting like a movie so they can watch the landscape pass outside, no one fights over what to listen to next like with music, and its much more mentally engaging than most other things. We use Audible and OverDrive to listen to books, depending on if we have money, and whats available from the library. If you get into a series, like we did with Iron Druid Chronicles, 9 books at average of 9 hours a book, which is 81 hours. At once a month, average of 2 hours listening while in the car, it will take us 10 months to get through the series.
That is a pretty good investment in our book, get it, and we highly recommend it to anyone else who spends tons of time traveling in cars with children.
-Daddy

#BrazierChildren #MondayMusings

https://www.audible.com/ep/giftcenter