Travel Guides Road Trips
Bernadette Roe
Road-tripping is the best. You can pack up and go, heading where the highways take you. There’s nothing like it, with the chance to explore the great outdoors and spontaneously venture to unexpected places. Best of all, the whole family can come along, including the four-legged members.
While road trips are the perfect way to travel and spend quality family time bonding, they can also be tough with long stretches in the car. The confined space can get messy and crowded pretty quickly, especially with kids in the back seat. Thankfully though, we’ve sourced one DIY road trip garbage bag hack on TikTok that’ll at least keep your car tidier.
The hack involves a plastic cereal container — like a Rubbermaid plastic cereal keeper with a cover and a flip-top lid — and lining it with a small garbage bag. This way, you can pass the plastic cereal container around the car anytime someone has garbage instead of having to do a garbage sweep at the end of a long day.
The easiest DIY road trip garbage can ever
@drekoluv
Road trip life hacks #travel#travelwithkids#travelsmart
♬ just did a good thing – lucaselvis
This amazing road trip hack allows you to collect garbage in your car easily. On Tiktok, Akiko Roman, known as @drekoluv, shared the useful tip. Not only does it keep all your garbage in one secure place, but the lid keeps any unpleasant smells at bay as well. Once you arrive at your destination that night, pull out the small garbage bag and throw away the contents.
It’s an incredibly simple hack but one that will certainly make long days in the car a lot easier and cleaner. In the comments, a TikTok user suggested adding some adhesive Velcro to the side and attaching the container to the back of a seat so that it’s easy to find and grab.
This, of course, only works in cars with specific kinds of fabrics, but it’s a good point nonetheless. The sealable lid means that the car still smells fresh and keeps out any insects or critters, should you stop to camp or decide to keep the same garbage bag for a few days.
Other household products to keep your car clean on a road trip
Dasha Petrenko/Shutterstock
Keeping the car clean on a road trip can be an extraordinary challenge, especially with little kids in tow. Thanks to the ingenious world of the internet, there’s a plethora of fantastic ideas for keeping mess to a minimum. In addition to using the plastic cereal container as a garbage can, be sure to pack disinfectant wipes and paper towels to have on hand in the vehicle to clean up the inevitable spill.
There are a few other clever household tools that work well in cars. Use small suction cup shower caddies and attach them to the windows in the back seat so that kids can have easy access to toys, books, water bottles, and whatever else they’ll need on hand. That way, you can pack up the shower caddy before you depart, and they can (hopefully) put things back and be able to find necessities throughout the drive.
You can also line the back seat with a long bath rug or extra long towel before putting car seats or booster seats on top in order to keep the seats clean and prevent crumbs from working their way into the nooks and crannies between seats. These tools, plus the cereal container to catch garbage, mean a much cleaner vehicle on your exciting road trip.
