We're planning to drive to visit my family later this year. It is roughly a 10-11 hour drive if we go straight through (I'm planning on making fairly frequent stops, however, as I think it would be unfair to expect our son to sit still the entire time, so I expect that the actual trip will take significantly longer).
How can I keep the trip pleasant for both my wife and I, and our son?
I know in-vehicle DVD players are very popular, but we want to avoid television until he's older (he'll be about 14 months at the time of the trip), and even then we don't want to rely on it to distract him. I'm looking for other suggestions for keeping him comfortable, happy, and entertained while we make our way across the country.
EDIT: The trip went very well. Here is what we did: We broke the trip into smaller portions. In retrospect, we could have done this better, as we stayed with friends in Pittsburgh, leaving us 8 hours to do the second leg of the outbound trip, but it was far preferable to traveling straight through. The trip was made much easier by providing two new largish toys featuring a variety of interactive activities (one was a cube containing a number of moving parts: beads, spinners, etc., and the other was a tray designed to fit over the lap with a number of musical buttons, levers, doors, etc.). Coming back we stopped in Ohio, and got a hotel room for the night, after driving until I started to get tired.
We did not try driving through the night, as that would have prevented us from being able to be awake for interactions with our family the first and last days of the actual vacation.
Other key tactics included making sure to have a bag with snacks, drinks, toys, etc. handy; a new, comfortable toddler car seat (our timing was perfect as he had just about outgrown the infant car seat by then); snack cups and sippy cups that we could hand him and let him self-feed from without supervision/assistance; the children's station on satellite radio; frequent rest-stops for diaper changes, meals, or just to stop and play; a changing pad and enough free space in the back seat that we could change a diaper in the car (while parked!); and being able to reach back and pick up the toys when he dropped them.
