If you're going to be road-tripping with your family this summer, get ready to embrace unexpected moments of both connection and inevitable chaos.

I found both when I packed up the car with my husband and two kids — one of them a teenager — for the eight-hour drive from Boston to Niagara Falls. We had taken long road trips as a family in the past, but our kids, now 8 and 14, are older now.

My son, firmly in his “closed-door, don’t talk to me” phase, wasn’t thrilled about spending over 460 miles trapped in our smallish Nissan Rogue. We also live in a part of the country where we don’t spend much time in cars in our everyday life.

How would we all manage the close quarters?

Here's some of what I learned — along with advice from the experts — about not only surviving a family road trip bu

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