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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op here. They are 9 and 6. My ipad has no data plan, what can they do in the car ride? They are not carsick but just they are bored from looking at same scenery (trees, farms and a few houses) along the highway. 
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Even if the ipad has no data plan, most cell phones do.  You can turn most smart phones into a hotspot and the ipad can join the Wifi on the smart phone hot spot.  Then the ipad is just using the data plan from the smart phone.

At that age, we had a limit of about 1-1.5 hours of devices at a time.  Then we would break the trip up with car games.  We get MadLibs and everyone takes turns giving words and the non-driving parent does the Madlibs.  We can usually do like 3 of them for about 45 min before they want something else.  We also play I Spy and we'll play alphabet games.  So we take turns with finding something that begins with A, then B, then C, etc.  When your kids are older and reading well enough you look at billboards, license plates, bumper stickers, etc and find words that begin with the letters.  Everyone can play every letter or you can rotate and each person gets a letter in order.  Or we pick categories and look for as many things that fit the categories as possible.  With the 6 year old, you can start with simpler ones like "anything red" and we all just call out things we find that are red.  We will try to find license plates from as many different states as possible.  So we try to play car games for an hour or so, then they can go back to electronics.  We also have a DVD player that I bought that has two screens, one that can mount on each front seat headrest, and we can play DVDs for them.  Now that our kids are in middle school, they will download movies from our streaming services onto one of their tablets and then they can watch them off-line.

Another option.  When our kids were younger (like 3-7), we would go to a local consignment store and the kids could fill one bag with things to do in the car for the trip.  Then we put those things away until the trip.  We would do this like 2 weeks before the trip and excitement of getting that bag of toys back would help them look forward to the trip.  Then we would give them new toys that they had picked out one at a time and they could play with them.  Each one would usually like like a half hour before they got bored.  So, for like $30-$40, we got a bag of "new to them" toys that would keep them entertained.  [/quote]

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