Fun Things To Do When You’re Stuck On The Road

They say the journey is what makes a road trip. Nobody promises the journey will be interesting the whole way. The scenery that looked stunning at 9 a.m. is just more fields by 11, and somewhere in the back seat, someone has started sighing at the window in a way that is clearly meant to be heard.

If you planned this trip, that sigh is aimed at you. Your reputation as road trip coordinator rides on the long, flat middle of the drive, and on the delays nobody saw coming: the closed lane, the hour in a queue, the detour through three villages that all seem to have the same name. The fix is not one big idea. It is a small bag of tricks you can pull from as the mood in the car shifts. These are the ones we keep coming back to.

Play Road Games

Road trips are meant to be about the moment you are in, and parking everyone except the driver in front of a separate screen works against that. Even now, the classics hold up. I Spy, Would You Rather and 20 Questions need no equipment, no signal and no explanation. If your group has outgrown them, try some new ones built with adults in mind, like the cow-spotting game where passing a cemetery wipes out the other side’s score, or the improv round where one player has to work out which absurd celebrity they are from the questions being fired at them.

Games like these do something a playlist cannot. Everyone gets a turn to talk, and you learn things about your passengers you would never hear over dinner. Your quiet cousin turns out to be ruthless at 20 Questions. Your best friend reveals a firm position on whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich. Those are the debates that turn into inside jokes, and inside jokes are what people remember about a trip years later.

One rule matters more than any scoring system: the driver plays on easy mode. NHTSA’s definition of distracted driving covers talking with the people in your car and fiddling with the entertainment system, not just phones, and the agency counted 3,208 deaths in distraction-affected crashes in the U.S. in 2024. So pick games the driver can join by voice alone, and agree in advance that any game pauses, mid-sentence if needed, the moment the road gets busy.

Listen To A Podcast Everyone Agrees On

A podcast is a neat way to use technology without everyone retreating into their own earbuds. Comedy, science, history, true crime: the genre matters less than two conditions. It has to suit everyone in the car, kids included, and everyone has to genuinely agree on it, not just put up with it.

The right episode can make an hour disappear. Better still, it gives the car something to talk about when it ends, which stretches a shared experience well past its runtime. To find that episode without a twenty-minute debate at the first toll booth:

• Ask everyone to nominate one show before the trip, then shortlist the ones nobody vetoes.
• Choose episodes that stand on their own, so a coffee stop halfway through does not leave anyone lost.
• Queue several episodes in advance, so nobody is scrolling through a phone at 70 mph.
• Hand control to the front passenger, never the driver.

Audio has one more quiet advantage. The CDC describes motion sickness as a clash between the movement your eyes see and the movement your inner ear senses, and it suggests sitting toward the front and looking at the horizon. A podcast lets a queasy passenger do exactly that, eyes up and out the window, without missing a thing.

Embark On An Audiobook Journey

Podcasts are perfect for an afternoon. They start to run thin across several eight-hour driving days. For a trip of that size, you want a story with real staying power, such as a Stephen King epic or another author who gets the group excited.

A well-read audiobook does something odd in a moving car. You are crossing real country while the story carries you somewhere else entirely, back a century or into a world that never existed. The narrator makes or breaks this. Before you commit to dozens of hours with one voice, play the free sample out loud and take a quick vote. If children are on board, check the content level too, because a horror classic lands very differently with a nine-year-old in the back.

Then do a little arithmetic. Add up your planned driving hours, keep roughly half of them for music, games, naps and stops, and look for a book that fits into the rest. Three days at six hours each gives you eighteen hours on the road, so a book of around nine hours should finish just before you arrive. Hearing the final chapter as your destination comes into view is a small piece of theater worth planning for. Everyone gets two journeys in one, and they reach the end of both together.

Make A Whacky Group Playlist

People are going to want music at some point anyway, so you might as well make the soundtrack part of the fun.

Before the trip, ask everyone to pitch in. Random picks work, but a theme turns a playlist into a game. Songs from your most embarrassing years, anthems you can shout until your voices give out, or film soundtracks where the car has to name the movie from the first few notes are just a handful of the endless variations. Each one hands a different person a moment to shine, which is really the point.

A few house rules keep the peace. Give everyone the same number of slots so nobody owns the car, shuffle the whole list so one person’s twelve songs do not play back to back, and agree on a 30-second rule before anyone reaches for skip. Save the playlist for offline listening as well, because the best singalong always seems to arrive just as the signal drops.

The singing is not just noise, either. In a study that followed adult education classes over seven months, people in singing classes felt close to their group far sooner than people in craft or creative writing classes, although the other groups caught up later on. The researchers called it an ice-breaker effect. A car full of people who barely know each other, or who have just spent two hours mildly irritated with each other, can use exactly that shortcut.

Download Media Beforehand

No single group activity can hold everyone’s attention for a full day. Some people need quiet time, and some get restless if they go too long without the show they are halfway through. Preparation is what keeps everyone content. Before you set off, have each person download whatever they plan to watch, play, read or hear. A quick pre-trip check:

• Episodes and films downloaded inside the streaming app, not just added to a watchlist
• Playlists, podcasts and audiobooks saved for offline listening
• Offline maps for the full route, in case the signal fails where you need it most
• A couple of games that work without any connection
• A test run the night before, with airplane mode on, to confirm everything actually plays

This does more than keep individuals happy. A tunnel or a patch of weak rural coverage cannot ruin a film that already lives on the device. Some services cap how many titles you can store, or how long they stay playable offline, so it is worth checking before you leave rather than finding out on a ferry.

It also protects your mobile data for the things that genuinely need it. Streaming video burns through data fast, and that matters even more when you cross borders, say on a tour of Europe. In that case, a Europe SIM card keeps you connected for the essentials, like checking maps or messaging people back home, while the library you downloaded in advance takes care of the entertainment.

Turn Stops Into Mini Adventures

Stops do not have to be quick sprints to the bathroom and the snack aisle. With some planning and a little flexibility, they can become small adventures that split a long drive into chapters.

You will be stopping regardless. Britain’s Highway Code recommends a break of at least 15 minutes after every two hours of driving, so a long day already contains several stops whether you plan them or not. You may as well make them count. Look ahead for a viewpoint, a local bakery or a short walking trail about two hours along the route, and give each stop a job. One simple rule works well: every stop earns one new local taste and one photo that nobody posed for.

A more memorable version is to watch a favorite film or show close to a place it made famous. Alnwick Castle in Northumberland stood in for Hogwarts in the early Harry Potter films, so watching one of them with the castle in view is a moment younger passengers will talk about for a long time. If you downloaded the film at home, it will play without a signal at all. If you would rather stream while traveling abroad, keep the best VPN for streaming on standby so you can reach shows and movies from your home region. EU residents driving between EU countries may need it less, since EU rules let paid subscriptions follow you when you are temporarily in another member state. Either way, read your streaming service’s terms before you rely on any workaround.

Create A Ridiculous Story Together

One sentence is all it takes to start what could be the funniest hour of the entire trip. The rules could not be simpler. Someone opens a story, and everyone else adds a sentence in turn. Will it grow into an epic quest, or collapse into nonsense three sentences in while the whole car wheezes with laughter? That depends on how much creativity and mischief your group brings. An opening round might go something like this:

The retired dentist found a treasure map folded inside a gas station sandwich.
Unfortunately, the map led only to a second, smaller sandwich.
She was not discouraged, because the second sandwich was humming.

Small twists keep it fresh over a long drive. Try one word per person instead of one sentence, require every turn to include something visible out the window, or alternate between good news and bad news so the hero’s luck swings wildly from turn to turn. The driver can join this one easily, since it needs nothing but a voice.

There is a reason this game tends to pull people closer. In a laughter study with Oxford University students, strangers who had just laughed together at a comedy clip went on to share more personal details than those who had watched a neutral or merely pleasant video, at least as outside observers rated it, and the participants did not seem to notice the change in themselves. A car full of people laughing about a humming sandwich is, quietly, a car full of people getting to know each other better.

Conclusion

Long drives and unplanned delays come with almost every road trip. You cannot avoid them, but you can decide what they feel like. The trick is variety and timing. Music suits the fresh first hour, games work best while energy is high, an audiobook fits the sleepy stretch after lunch, a podcast fills the gap when conversation runs dry, and the story game comes into its own once everyone is giddy and a little tired. Keep the driver’s eyes on the road, download before you go, and treat every stop as a chance for something small and new. Do that, and the slow parts of the trip may turn out to be the parts everyone talks about afterward.

Disclaimer: This article is for general information only. The driver’s attention belongs on the road at all times, so drivers should not watch, read or handle screens while driving and should follow local laws on phone use. Using a VPN to stream content from another region may breach a service’s terms or local rules, so check before relying on one. Mobile data, roaming and SIM costs vary by provider and country.

References

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Motion sickness. CDC Travelers’ Health.
• Department for Transport. (n.d.). The Highway Code: Rules for drivers and motorcyclists (89 to 102), Rule 91. GOV.UK.
• Gray, A. W., Parkinson, B., & Dunbar, R. I. (2015). Laughter’s influence on the intimacy of self-disclosure. Human Nature, 26(1), 28-43. doi:10.1007/s12110-015-9225-8
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (n.d.). Distracted driving in 2024 (Research Note). U.S. Department of Transportation.
• Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2(10), 150221. doi:10.1098/rsos.150221
• Regulation (EU) 2017/1128 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017 on cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market. Official Journal of the European Union, L 168, 30 June 2017.