Redbox Rocks!

As we prepared to make our annual trek to California this summer, I thought about how I was going to keep the kiddos entertained for the 14 hour drive. Last year, we completed the trek without the help of a DVD player, can you believe it? It was a lot of work and required a lot of patience on my part! We drove out again in April with an assortment of items (DVD player included) and found that the kids didn't like what they had brought for movies and entertainment. This time I just wanted it to be simple and fun. I didn't want the car to be full of trash and unwanted items just taking up space. So we packed the Nintendo DS and the DVD player and that was it! We stopped at a red box in our town and got two movies which they watched during the first 8 hours of the trip. At one of our pitstops the boys asked if they could have some crayons and notebooks to color so I eagerly said yes. Between the movies and coloring, the first eight hours sailed by. Right around our halfway point we stopped at another Redbox and got two more movies. This entertained them for the second half of the trip. It was wonderful! Redbox kiosks can be found practically anywhere! They have an app you can download to search for nearby kiosks. I returned the last two movies when I reached my destination. I know that some of you may think that it was movie overload, but they still managed to play the license plate game, slug bug, and the alphabet ( find the letters in signs) game too! They colored for hours and the Nintendo DS never came out of their cases! Keep in mind also that kids movies are usually shorter; i think the longest one we watched was 80 min! It was wonderful! Another perk was that the total cost of the rentals totaled about $8.50, which is a lot cheaper than buying any new movie, which only gets viewed once and than put away never to be watched again. Now that we are at our destination, tv time will be very limited due to our other activities.
Redbox has new releases every week, so when we are ready to head home, I think we will hit the Redbox tour again!

As a side note, for those of you like myself who don't have a 3G electronic device, I just pulled into a McDonald's parking lot to access their wi-fi when I needed to find a Redbox or look up my directions to our destination. Very convenient and I figure I patronize their eatery way more than I should anyway, so I don't feel guilty about using it without a purchase!