Road Trip Scavenger Hunt For Kids And Adults {Free Printable}

When we go for a long car trip, I always need a way to keep my kids entertained. This road trip scavenger hunt is exactly what we need!

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Road Trip Scavenger Hunt {Free Printable}

Growing up, I always had music in the car and car bingo. We had no movies, and Mean Mom (me) uses that same mantra for my own children.

We always took a ton of road trips, whether driving from wherever we lived at the time to Chicago to visit family or driving to Florida for vacation (and let me tell you, that drive from Minnesota is loooooong), and we did all sorts of car games.

The wee ones don’t like bingo, however. It doesn’t last long enough for them, and they inevitably find that their bingo doesn’t fit for where we happen to be at the time.

Whether it’s a trip in the car to the city where we’ll never find that elusive cow they need to be able to shout bingo or we’re on the long rural road trip where it’s semi after car with just fields on the side, they never hit bingo. They get frustrated, and so I came up with a new idea.

How to Play with the Road Trip Scavenger Hunt

Now that they’re older, we can do something more complex that will take a little more time – and be more fun for all of us. I created versions of tween and up road trip scavenger hunts.

Depending on our moods, we have various rules as to how you win, but a few things always hold constant. Your “find” has to be verified by someone else in the car, and only the first person to spot a specific item on the scavenger hunt list gets credit for that specific find.

In other words, if I see a billboard for a gas station, no one else can count that billboard. Instead, they have to wait until the next gas station billboard to earn any points.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t lead to many arguments. The wee ones are smart enough to know that if they refuse to acknowledge that the other child saw something, that denied child won’t acknowledge that they saw something – suddenly everyone plays fair, especially when I’m playing with them!

Typically, we’ll give the first person to spot an item on the list 2 points and everyone after that only gets one point. If it’s a short trip, we’ll say that only the first person gets any points for spotting an item on the list.

That holds true if we do a timed version of the game, as sometimes we just need a short distraction and will play for 15 minutes. Little Miss loves setting the timer on her watch so we know exactly when to count up points.

Most of the time, however, we play an open game for the entire trip, which is why there’s such a wide and varied list of items on the scavenger hunt. We want it to be a bit of a challenge, and it’s best when not every item can be checked off easily.

How boring if you find everything in the first fifteen minutes!

Make Your Own Road Trip Scavenger Hunt

To create these at home, print them off and then laminate them, which means you can use the tween road trip scavenger hunts over and over. It also makes them more durable and easier to write on than they would be if it was simply a sheet of printed paper.

If you don’t have a home laminator, pick one up! They aren’t super expensive, and I use mine all the time to save everything from special kid artwork to kid to do lists (which keep me from nagging and get them focused on what they need to do) to packing lists for camping or travel and so much more.

I find that gluing them to cardstock or printing them directly on cardstock and then laminating them works even better if you have kids who are hard on their belongings, but the wee ones like them this way.

I print them double sided, so it’s easy to flip over from our in town road trip scavenger hunt to a highway road trip scavenger hunt.

Once they’re laminated, punch a hole in the top corner, and screw a quick link into the hole.

The quick links are great because they don’t unclip like a regular carabiner. Make sure you pick up ones in different colors for each on you print or paint them with nail polish so people know which one belongs to who!

Tie string to your quick link and tape or glue it so that it doesn’t come undone. Ensure the string is not quite as long as the road trip scavenger hunt paper, and attach the top of a dry erase marker to the string with tape.

This way, no one can lose the top (something we have an issue with in our house!) and you have all the tools you need to play in one convenient place.

Get the free printable for this road trip scavenger hunt!

Save this road trip scavenger hunt to print again.

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