Tips on how to avoid carsickness on your road trip
School is out, the holiday is booked, a rental car reserved and suitcases ready at the door. According to the checklist everything is in place and nothing should now go wrong.
However, to be able to fully enjoy one´s holiday, one has to pack a bit of good health in and even be prepared for when the feared carsickness strikes either them or one of their family members.
Being on vacation is surely one of the best times of the year! Everyone is excited, relaxed and in a good mood. Nonetheless many people spend their well-deserved holiday sick in bed.
Good preparation is therefore imperative that one can be healthy and enjoy their time off. Carsickness is one of the most common holiday illnesses that often children and even adults suffer from during road trips. Headaches, nausea and dizziness characterise the typical symptoms of carsickness, and often lead to vomiting. Especially on long road trips, motion sickness or kinetosis, as the experts call it, can catch you by surprise. Kinetosis is based on a disorder between visually perceived movement and the vestibular system´s sense of movement, and will therefore increase the chances of motion sickness when one drives on particularly winding roads, especially if sitting in the rear-end of the car.
carhiremarket.com wants its customers to have an enjoyable and sick-free road trip with their rental car, and therefore has a few key tips and tricks on how to avoid carsickness:
1. If one sits in the rear of the rental car and they start feeling dizzy and nauseous, they should open the window and get some fresh air. At the next opportunity, one should ask the driver to pull over, stretch their legs and drink some water.
2. For the rest of the journey, it is recommended that they sit in the front seat or perhaps if they feel comfortable and are insured to do so, they can drive as research has shown that drivers tend to not suffer from motion sickness.
3. As a general rule, one should always look straight ahead and focus on the horizon. One should restrict looking left and right or below. That causes more confusion and can lead to further carsickness. One should not read anything in the car, even looking at a handy or a map can cause carsickness.
The day before one leave on holiday with their rental car, they should make sure that they only eat light food with no spices which can give their tummy further reason to rebel. Kids are often the victims of carsickness as they tend to eat greasy food and drink creamy milkshakes on a road trip. One should make sure that one packs healthy snacks for the kids and encourage them to tell when they start feeling dizzy and sick. Chewing some gum or sucking on a sweet can also help against carsickness. One should try to avoid drinking coffee or smoking as these will only contribute to the symptoms. Rather try out other homemade remedies such as ginger tablets or visit one´s pharmacy before leaving to get a couple of motion sickness tablets. One should be prepared that nothing can catch them off guard.