Travel Kits-A Review

Product: Travel Kits: A Simple Way to Bless Others by Donna Rus
Company: The Old Schoolhouse
Price: 12.95$US

We spend time in our car. We spend A LOT of time in the car. As spontaneous people, we often decide out of the blue to pack a bag, hop in the car and GO. Instead of taking one family vacation a year we easily take five or six overnight, unplanned weekend trips with our 3 children. We have had to come up with ways to keep the children occupied on these trips because, well, half of the trip is usually spent getting wherever we are going, so the getting there has to be fun as well! Several years ago I started keeping a packed variety bag of books, treats, and small toys in my closet so that when we wanted to hop in the car we'd have something prepared for the kids that would keep them busy. Well, apparently, I'm not the only one who does this and Donna Rus has written an e-book Travel Kits: A Simple Way to Bless Others to help others learn how to make traveling kits as well.

This e-book from The Old Schoolhouse explains what a travel kit is, who can use it (just about anyone), and makes lots of suggestions for what kinds of things make good travel ideas. In addition, she talks about way to organize the gifts, which she usually wraps, if you are making a travel kit for more than one child. The book is jam packed with pictures of different, creative travel kits the author has made.



While I did like some of her suggestions, I would not be willing to pay 12.95$US for this product. I went to our local dollar store, as suggested in the book, to purchase some items to make a travel kit of our own and I honestly could not imagine buying them more stuff. Many of the items suggested for the travel kits are things that I would not be willing to buy my children so they were not particularly useful. Many of the things that I use in my travel kits are old toys that my children have not seen in a while or books we haven't read and they are happy with those. I don't feel the need to contribute to consumerism by buying them more things that they don't need. If I had the money to buy quality items that would be useful after the trip I might have been more willing to buy new things, but with our numerous mini vacations a year, that is not the case. Another thing that I found was that most of her example travel kits were HUGE. With three big car seats in the back of our small car there would never be room for such large travel kits (though, they do give a lot of suggestions for smaller items as well. While I definitely think that this book could be useful for people that have never packed travel bags for their children, I think that a lot of the information is common sense. As I have been packing fun bags for my children for years, I did not find a lot of the information new to me and therefor would not be interested in purchasing the book myself at 12.95$US.

To find out more about Travel Kits: A Simple Way to Bless Others please check out The Old Schoolhouse Store here. To find out what other people thought of this product please visit The Homeschool Crew website.

**Any products reviewed by me as a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew have been given to me free of charge in order for me to provide you with an honest review of the product and/or how we used the product within our family. I do not receive any other form of compensation for the reviews posted on this blog.