Top five tips to beat the holiday traffic blues

Leave early, they said. You’ll beat the traffic, they said!

The truth is, you should plan your trip based on your kilometres to travel and desired arrival time. Do the math.

Add in ample time for toilet breaks, exploring points of interest and driver rest stops (whether you think you need them or not).

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re running behind schedule – it adds unnecessary pressure to the journey. And then there’s the dreaded ‘are we there yet’ from the cheap seats. Plan ahead.

There’s nothing worse than getting on your merry way only to discover your best route is riddled with roadworks, stand-still traffic or, worse still, an accident.

There are plenty of smartphone apps or live traffic websites that will help you to avoid such incidents – Apple Maps, Google Maps and Waze are our top three.

Maybe your car has real-time traffic updates? Now is the time to make sure you know how to access these features. May the world-wide-web be with you.

Sleep deprivation is a shocker and it can trigger a sour mood like nobody’s business. Getting a good sleep the night before you hit the road sounds like a no-brainer, but we’re usually up late cramming last-minute must-haves into our suitcases.

Then, we have a restless night’s sleep worrying we’ve forgotten something or that we’re going to sleep through our alarm! Or is that just me?

Hitting the holiday roads tired is not only tedious, but also dangerous as our patience and attention levels are diminished.

A healthy meal makes for a healthy mind. Not that there’s anything wrong with fast food, but we’ve all fallen victim to post Big Mac regrets or a KFC carb crash.

Make sure you all have a good meal before you head off – one hungry passenger is all it takes – and pack healthy snacks of fruit, nuts, treats and plenty of water.

Boring, we know, but the best advice often is! Here are three top snack picks!

Our hearts break when we see a frazzled family piling out of a car in the emergency lane as the designated parent unloads the perfectly packed boot load to get to the spare tyre… only to discover it’s unusable.

It’s at this time you get that dreadful sinking feeling… ‘did I check my spare tyre… do I know how to change a tyre?’.

Keeping your car well maintained – tyres, engine etc – is paramount to your safety. It makes the weight of your hungry, tired and impatient passengers pale into insignificance. Read our tyre safety tips here.