When we told people we were moving cross-country, almost everyone asked the same question first: “So are you road-tripping it?” Like that was the fun part we should be looking forward to. And look, in a version of my life without kids, maybe. A version where “we” means two adults, a full tank of gas, and zero opinions from the backseat about how many more hours until we stop.
That is not the move we had.
The Fantasy vs. The Actual Math
I want to be honest about how tempting the road-trip version was in my head for about a week. National parks along the way. A “look at this landmark” photo for every state line. The kind of trip that makes a good highlight reel.
Then I actually mapped it out against our timeline — new job start date, school enrollment deadlines, the fact that our youngest gets carsick after about 90 minutes on a good day — and the fantasy fell apart fast. We weren’t looking at a leisurely two-week meander. We were looking at three days of 9+ hours in the car, with two kids, trying to hit a start date that didn’t care how scenic Route 40 was.
Three days of that is a completely different trip than the one people picture when they say “road trip.” It’s not an adventure. It’s an endurance event with juice boxes.
What We Did Instead
We flew. All four of us, one travel day, done. And we had our car shipped to meet us at the new house instead of driving it.
I’ll admit I was skeptical the first time a friend mentioned doing this for her own move. It felt like something people did with classic cars or motorcycles, not a regular family SUV with a booster seat still installed and Goldfish crackers ground into the console. But it turns out auto transport companies move completely ordinary family vehicles all the time, and the process was a lot less complicated than I expected. A carrier picked the car up from our old driveway, and it was waiting for us — already there — by the time we’d unpacked our first box at the new place.
What Actually Changed for Us
The obvious win was time. We got our moving week back instead of losing three days of it to a highway. But the part I didn’t expect to matter as much was how much calmer the whole move felt without a multi-day drive hanging over it. Moving with kids is already a lot — new school, new house, saying goodbye to friends, all of it happening at once. Not also managing hotel stops, bored kids, and a car full of everything we didn’t put in the moving truck took one entire category of stress off the table.
It also meant our car showed up without three extra days and a thousand-plus miles on it, which, unrelated to my sanity but still nice, matters when you’re trying to keep a vehicle running well for as long as possible.
Would I Do It Again?
Without hesitation. I think there’s a real road trip version of this — the one with the national parks and the highlight reel — that’s worth doing on its own terms, when it’s the actual point of the trip and not an obstacle between you and unpacking. But a relocation with two kids on a deadline is not that trip, no matter how good it looks in theory.
If you’re staring down a move like ours and someone asks whether you’re road-tripping it, it’s completely fine to say no. We used Mile Auto Transport to ship our car and flew instead, and it turned a three-day slog into a non-event — which, when you’re already juggling a cross-country move with kids, is exactly the kind of thing you want to be able to cross off the list without thinking about it again.
