5 Family Vacation Traditions

Start your vacation tradition weeks before you hit the road. Children love to explore maps, so buy several state or city maps and let them help plot the route. They'll learn invaluable map-reading skills and be able to ask questions about the area in which they'll soon vacation. By tracing the route, they'll assume a navigator role -- and a sense of empowerment [Travel Sense].

These maps can play double-duty as a souvenir after your trip ends, too. Turn them into colorful backgrounds for scrapbook pages, fold them into envelopes that can hold trip mementos or use them as part of a larger travel collage to illustrate the route your child helped select [source: Martha Stewart].

Repeating the tradition with each annual family vacation is something children are sure to anticipate. Plus, it will keep their minds -- and hands -- busy while you make last-minute travel preparations.

A family vacation is the perfect time to start a new culinary tradition. Get off the fast-food track by packing picnic lunches to eat at scenic parks along the way. And you can bypass the dubious nutritional quality of airport snacks if you make and take your own. Try granola, trail mix, fresh vegetables or cheese sticks that your children can prepare (or at least pack) themselves -- which also means they'll be more likely to eat them [source: Waechter].

Dining exclusively at mom-and-pop-style eateries and other locally owned establishments is a vacation tradition your children will be sure to remember. It adds a valuable layer of experience, because local foods reflect a region's history and tradition. And eating at a favorite local restaurant will become its own tradition the next time you return to the area.

The best travel games are those that don't require any special equipment -- or take up any extra room in a backpack or the backseat. And the truly great games are ones your kids will want to play again and again. These games can become a tradition that your children may introduce to their own offspring someday.

In your travel tradition arsenal, keep games like "I Spy." Take turns letting each child spy, with his "little eye," an object or color inside or outside of the car or airplane as other family members try to guess what it is.

On a road trip, try to find a license plate from each state, or give it a twist for older kids: Turn license plate letters into acronyms. The letters ILC, for example, could mean "I like carrots" [source: FamilyFun].

Photographs are wonderful, if perhaps obvious, vacation souvenirs. And they're great fodder for family traditions, too. During your trip, make a tradition out of each stop. For example, take a photo of your children in front of the iconic marker at each state line.

Don't let the fun end when you return home. You can create a family T-shirt using a photo you took, a design by your resident artist, an annual slogan (like "5th annual Brown family vacay") or a list of places you visited on your "tour." Local or online shirt printers can turn your ideas into wearable, personal souvenirs, or you can use home-printed iron-on transfers to make your own.

If you collected little treasures along your way, show them off instead of putting them in an out-of-sight place for storage. Use a framed memory box to display rows or groupings of sea shells, tree leaves or other objects from your vacation, like the witticisms contained in fortune cookies [source: Martha Stewart]. Seeing the collection will trigger pleasant memories, and creating the visual art may become a family tradition, too.

Sometimes a vacation destination can become a family tradition all its own. A lakeside resort nestled within a thousand-acre national park, for example, can grow with your family's interests from year to year. While your children are young, they can spend afternoons at the swimming pool. By the time they're teenagers, they can race jet skis around a nearby lake.

Or consider choosing a different destination for each trip based on your family's favorite activity, such as a ski lodge, dude ranch or theme park. Alternatively, make it a tradition to embark on a new activity each year.

Remember, family vacation traditions aren't all about the destination; there are equally important inner journeys taking place, too. Wherever you go, you've already done the most important thing of all: gone somewhere together.