Being on the go, often in places without cell service, unencumbered by many of the stresses of life’s routine, is just so freeing. We’ve been fortunate to plan some pretty epic highway adventures, which you can learn more about here and here, and want to pass on some pro tips we’ve learned along the way!
This has always been our starting point for road trip planning. Once you start dreaming about your adventure, it can be hard to know when to turn around!Ask yourself what your trip goals are:
And sometimes these answers are easy! For our first parks trip, we knew we wanted to see National Parks, and get up to Glacier. With how far north it is, that became an easy tip of the iceberg! While we had some time flexibility, we knew we wanted to be gone around two weeks, so all our stops had to fit that time frame.
Our second trip was less clear. We knew we wanted to go either up or down California, but it was hard to decide whether or not to include Crater Lake, Portland, Seattle, and the Washington National Parks! Those places are obviously beautiful, and we wanted to include them in the trip.
That led us to ask, “How long can we be gone?” Working within Brooke’s time off, we couldn’t be gone forever! Once we could answer that question, it became clear that our route including more of the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t fit our timeline. So, Redwood became our furthest point from home!
I've also found it helpful to start with an end destination or date and work backwards! Building your trip starting with an endpoint makes it really easy to know what all you can fit in each day, or when you need to leave to make the whole trip happen.
Now that you’ve got a time frame and a final destination picked out, the stops in between can start to take shape. This question will look different for everyone depending on your tolerance for car time. For us on both trips, we averaged about 5 hours of car time each day we were moving between stops. And 5 hours was a sweet spot for us! It gave plenty of time for a slow morning on travel days, if we needed it, but still allowed for plenty of time to hit destinations along the way!
Not every day needs to look the same! We generally saw 7-8 hours as a maximum for us, traveling with baby and dog, and have taken some smaller hops that were only 2-3 hours. It all depends on what you’re looking to accomplish that day.
There are obvious benefits to knowing where you’re going to stay each night! It gives you a goal for each day, and sometimes after a lot of driving, it can be really nice to have a daily destination. If you have the flexibility, there’s a sense of freedom to finding a place off the road to camp, or stopping in that unusual, quaint town you just stumbled upon and want to explore.
Especially after 2020, most establishments have a solid online ordering system, which makes it really easy to schedule your food and have it ready when you get there! Our favorite town we’ve found this way is Casper, Wyoming. It’s so charming, right on a river, and we found a great soda fountain that’s run out of their historic movie theater. This may not be for everyone, but taking food planning on the fly out of the equation has been helpful for us in avoiding hangry stretches!
On the flip side, not having your entire trip planned out does leave room for flexibility if you find somewhere you’d like to explore further! We’ve hit a number of towns for meals and thought, “Wow, this is super cool, I wish we had planned for more time here!”
Websites like Expedia and Priceline often have refundable options up to the day of check in. Make sure you read the cancellation policy before booking, and take advantage of it! Be careful of this with Airbnb though. Not only because of their generally more restrictive cancellation policies, but because it’s a source of income for many people! Last second stays rarely get booked, and cancelling that night moments before is a much bigger hit than it would be for a hotel.
This is an important part of trip planning! The route from Fort Worth to Glacier National Park and back looks a lot different than the route we took. But, we obviously had other markers we were trying to hit. On a given day of driving, if we started seeing signs for something interesting, we were willing to drive an extra hour off course!
Utilizing Google Maps or Roadtrippers to chart your trip can be really helpful for this. Start with searching from Home to your final destination, and then add Home as a third stop. For us, I always try to avoid going back the same way we came, and will start by choosing an alternate route, so that my trip is a circle on the map. It’s a personal preference, but if you’re on the road, you might as well see something new!
Then, start zooming in on areas of the trip to see what populates along the way. This is often best used when you’ve got a few destinations in mind, as it starts to frame the skeleton of your route. The first locations you’ll see pop up are major cities, which often serve as great mile markers for major attractions.
The vacation planning app space is...surprisingly unimpressive! But here’s what I use as resources when planning.
There you have it! I hope this is a helpful resource for getting started planning a road trip. My ultimate piece of advice: dream big! If you can’t figure out how to get everything in, pare things down as you plan, but always start out going as big as possible!
