My wife’s family owns some property in NE California so every Labor Day weekend we pack up the kids and head south. It is a very long drive, about 8 hours with limited stops. For us it was more like 9.5 since the girls need to stop to go to the bathroom, run off a little excess energy and eat.

In years past we have packed the portable DVD player and a handful of DVDs but this solution was not a good one once we had a second child. Last year we rigged up this horrible interface that made it hard for both girls to see and was way to soft for either one to hear.

This year we have… an iPad! So with movies loaded (ripped using HandBrake), I rigged up a string to go across the two front seats, used the case to straddle the rope and another string to make sure it didn’t slip off. It was now close enough to plug it into the auxiliary port on the car stereo system, too, so the girls got surround sound. Another bonus: every time we needed to change a movie we could flip the screen to the front seats without removing it from its hanging position. Because the screen would rotate, we could see the controls right side up!

A couple of grainy pictures for you to see the entire set up (and my two lovely daughters):

Back to our regular programming next week, but thought I would share an innovative use of the iPad this week. Thanks, Apple, for making this trip a lot easier.