Travel is not just about the destination; it’s about the journey. Similarly, plans are not just about the maps/budgets/reservations; they are about discovering unexpected highlights and alternative routes. Take time planning your trip, have fun with it, and you’ll be halfway to have a great adventure!

But first, a Rambler Story!

For my 10th birthday, my parents made arrangements for a trip to Disneyland, but, earlier in the year, when I was still just 9, they told me that I could plan a road trip to Disneyland and I could invite a friend. For some reason, I didn’t really feel like I was going to take the trip I was planning, but I took my planning job very seriously, nonetheless. This was “back in the day”, when we used paper media for research, too! I pored over maps, measured distances along curving roads with a ruler, and calculated drive times between towns with a pencil on scratch paper. In the library, I looked through newspapers from towns along the route to find advertised gas prices and discounts for motels, then pulled the yellow pages and made long-distance calls to compare hotel rates. Of course, I also budgeted for food and Disneyland tickets. I was proud of my work when I presented my itinerary and my budget to my parents, and surprised when my folks approved all of my plans (with the exception of the stay at a Los Angeles hotel; we stayed with family friends instead).

Planning that trip was a very empowering experience, and I still really enjoy the planning phase of my travels a great deal. Of course, over time, I’ve learned that having a good plan can also make the difference between a great adventure and one that is disappointing…and I love that I now live in a world where all the maps I need are available with the click of a button!

How to plan an awesome US Road Trip

1. Prepare your vehicle

Whether you are taking your own vehicle or renting one, you’ll need a vehicle for a road trip. Choose your vehicle wisely; it will be your home away from home during your travels. If you are traveling through the deserts in summer, you’ll want a car with air conditioning. I’m fond of cars with cruise control as well. Most important, the vehicle must have room for you and your fellow roadtrippers to store all your stuff and ride in style.

• Drivers, select your vehicles! Are you taking your own vehicle? Borrowing one from friends or family? Renting from an agency? Knowing which vehicle you’ll be travelling in is critical for the rest of your planning, from your budget to your packing list. Make a note of the average miles per gallon for your vehicle so you can use it to calculate your gas budget. Do this even if you are riding along with someone else so you have a good idea how much to contribute to the gas fund.
• Check the condition of the vehicle and schedule any necessary maintenance. Think about tire condition, oil changes, and any maintenance that will come due before the end of your trip.  For instance, if you are at 98,000 miles and planning a 3,000 mile trip, you should go ahead and replace your timing belt before you go.
• Double check your insurance coverage. Whatever your level of coverage, make sure you are up to date. 30 minutes after an accident is an awful time to discover you missed a bill payment!
• Purchase AAA if you haven’t already. Do this even if you are not a driver, because AAA covers *you* (not the vehicle). The peace of mind that comes with AAA coverage is well-worth the investment, in my opinion.

2. High level decisions

These are the decisions that will help guide the rest of your decisions.

• Pick a theme.  Good road trips, like good parties, have a theme. If you’re planning a boring road trip instead of an awesome road trip, you won’t need a theme, but if you want awesomeness, you need a theme. Your theme will help you decide which scenic routes to take and where to stop for night on the way to your destination. Your theme doesn’t have to be clever, it can be quite simple: waterfalls or campgrounds will do fine. “The same name game” can be a fun theme for long roadtrips in the US. Our big cities often share their name with smaller, lesser known cities, and it can be fun to visit both in the same trip.
• Decide on a budget for your trip. There are many ways to travel, and a small budget doesn’t need to keep you at home, and planning, especially for a small budget, will help make sure you’re not stranded on empty 50 miles from home! That said, it’s important to have a safety cushion to handle vehicle failures or unhealthy traveling companions.
• Pick a timeline for your trip. While families with littles may find that it’s important to schedule a trip on a weekend or over a school break, other travelers may want to travel while most people are in school and at work. Make sure to take note of any special dates – birthdays or other holidays – that will be happening while you’re traveling. Lunch with an old chum from out of town can make for a great birthday!
• Identify your destinations. Don’t worry about all the possible routes and stops and attractions just yet…these are just the end-points of your trip.

3. Find your route

This is the fun stuff! Don’t hurry through it! This is not about a goal, it’s about exploration and learning new things, even if we’re traveling a route we’ve been driving since childhood.

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  Find the most common routes. Pull up your favorite mapping application and have it show you the common routes between your destinations. Most mapping applications will also display travel times and mileage for the 2 or 3 most common routes. Sometimes a route that only adds 15 minutes to your drive time will take you on a scenic highway where you can enjoy a nice view while you drive. Make note of this most common routes.

  

• Find uncommon routes. Explore the map and look for less common routes between points along the common routes. For instance, can you take back roads to cut across a corner between highways? Can you travel on the “other” side of a familiar mountain range to see new scenery? As before, look for locations that match your theme.
• Find attractions along both the common and uncommon routes. Zoom in close to look for tiny towns that might have an interesting local feature (great fried chicken…or a huge chicken!). Explore the areas within 10 or 20 miles of your route, too.
• Select your favorite route(s). At this point you might have over a dozen potential routes, but there are probably a few that stand out over the others. If you don’t have just one favorite yet, that’s OK. Do the next steps for all of your favorites, and, eventually, your favorite route will reveal itself.
• Select your nightly stops. Using the information gained from exploring the route, select the places you’ll stop each night. You can be general at this point…you don’t need to pick the motel, just the town.
• Select your gas stops. Using the information gained from exploring the route, identify the places you’ll stop for gas and bio breaks. Plan to stop every couple of hours, even if just for a quick photo at a scenic viewpoint, and stop for at least 30 minutes every 4 hours for meals and refreshments.

4. Fill in the details

This is the step that helps us make sure our travels will be within our budget and that we’ll arrive with plenty of time to get ready to go back to work or school. At this point in the process, you may still have several different itinerary options, and putting the information into spreadsheets can help make it easier to pick between them based on information like timelines and budget. When planning a roadtrip, I consider all plans to be tentative until they are actually implemented, so, for me, this spreadsheet must be easy to update as outside factors influence my planning process.

• Populate a spreadsheet for planning and tracking.  I use Google docs and I create  a “detailed” and “summary” version of my spreadsheet for each of my potential itineraries. During my travels, I will go back and update the spreadsheet with actual values to compare my plan to my implementation, which can help keep the trip on budget even as the plan morphs over the course of your travels. You’ll find your own favorite things to track, but here are my favorites.
  • The detail spreadsheet:
    • itinerary date (one row for each day of travel)
    • travel description (for instance, “Lincoln to KC”, or, if I’m staying in one town, the town name)
    • gas price
    • estimated miles (the distance between destinations from my favorite mapping application, or, if I’m not traveling between destinations, the number of in-town miles I expect to drive)
    • calculated total gas price ([miles/mpg]*gas price)
    • calculated drive time (I just use [miles/60 mph] for my formula, and it’s fine for my estimation purposes)
    • estimated food cost (use your favorite search engine to get an estimate for meals at restaurants in the areas you’re stopping for food)
    • estimated lodging cost (campground fees, hotel cost, etc)
    • estimated misc expenses (souvenirs, tolls, parking, etc)
    • notes (I use this to explain big discrepancies in my daily budget…for instance, a note that I’ll be taking someone out for dinner in an expensive town or purchasing an expensive souvenir)
  • The summary spreadsheet (all calculated from the details sheet):

    

    • • total miles
      • total days
      • total drive time
      • overall total cost (and individual totals for gas, food, lodging and misc)
      • average miles/day
      • average overall costs/day (and individual averages for gas, food, lodging and misc)
      • average total cost/mile (and individual averages for gas, food, lodging and misc)

• Check your summary for each itinerary. Is the trip length within expectations? What about the budget?
• Adjust the details as needed to create an appropriate itinerary and budget.

5. Make a list

When we’re heading out on an adventure, we want to have everything we need and nothing we don’t. The packing list is a boon for both the minimalist and the “everything *including* the kitchen sink” traveler (waves from across the campground…”hello, would you like to use my kitchen sink?”). The packing list helps you work toward that “everything and nothing” balance.

Unless you literally have a perfect memory, the packing list is your friend. Once it’s on the list you don’t have to remember to bring it; the list remembers for you.

As you’re making your list, think about the activities you have planned and the places you’re staying to make sure you have special equipment like life vests or the campfire panini press.

I like to use the Packing List app to make my list-making process easy. The list fields include dropdowns for where the item is stored in the house and which bag you’ll be packing the item into. These features make the actual packing (and double-checking) easy.

• Car’s emergency kit – be sure to include seasonally appropriate gear in this part of your list – extra hand-warmers and chains in the winter, extra water and and window shades in the summer.
• Food and shelter – every road trip needs to have road snacks on the packing list! If you are avoiding the unhealthy fast food fare that is ubiquitous along American highways, you’ll probably be packing a whole cooler full of snacks and drinks, and don’t forget to include the eating and cleanup utensils you’ll need. If you’re traveling with an animal, their food (and food bowl) should be on your packing list, for sure. If you are camping out along the way, list all your camp gear here, too. In my opinion, every road trip food and shelter kit needs a can opener, a corkscrew, and a bottle opener. You might not use all 3 every trip, but if you leave one, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll need it.
• Clothing and personal items  – if you are planning a fancy night on the town in between your trailhead destinations, be sure you include clothing and shoes for your fancy night. Also, be sure to include all the “little things” like your wallet, passport, undies and toiletries. Speaking of toiletries…don’t just put “toiletries” on your list. It will only take a moment to list out each individual item: shampoo, body soap, toothbrush, and so on. That way,  you won’t spend your trip washing your hair with body soap or brushing without toothpaste even though you packed “toiletries”!

6. Get Ready

Once you know your itinerary, you’re ready to start preparing for your trip.

• Check your passport. If you are traveling near the Canadian or Mexican borders, make sure your passport is up to date. If you don’t have time to get or renew your passport, at least include your birth certificate in your packing items. As of June 2018, your birth certificate in combination with your state ID will provide you with the documentation you need to travel back into the US if you decide to pop over the border.
• Make reservations for your overnight stays, if possible. There are few things that can dampen a trip as much as arriving at your destination only to find out that you’re passing through on the one night a year every room in town is booked! Making reservations isn’t just for hotel stays, either. Most campgrounds offer some way to make reservations, too. Even if you are staying with friends, you should check in well in advance to make sure that their guest space is available.
• Purchase any new gear, or clothing that you need for your trip. Be sure to try on, set up, or break in any new equipment before your trip. In the dark, at the end of a 12 hour drive, is not the time to discover that your new tent is missing a pole, and you seriously don’t want to break in your new shoes while you’re trying to enjoy a walking tour of your favorite downtown.
• Take the car in for scheduled maintenance. Give it a good wash and vacuum while you’re at it!

7. Get Packed

We made a list and checked it twice. Now we’re ready to start packing. This is your last chance to start your travels with the perfect balance of “everything and nothing” so start packing well in advance. If we wait until the last minute to start our packing, we’re more likely to hurry through the process rather than being thoughtful about what we really do (and don’t) need.

• Start packing!  You can start packing well in advance of your trip by starting with the items that you won’t use for everyday life before your trip. Your car kit and any camping items or sleeping bags (if you will be camping or providing your own bedding during during your travels). As time gets closer, pack up the clothing items you won’t need again before your trip and “pantry” items like snacks and canned foods.
• Do a reality check. Is everything going to fit in the space you have available? Did you update your plans but not your list and now you need fancy dress clothes for your hiking themed road trip? Is there anything on the list you really don’t need?
• Pack your ice chest, if you’ll be taking one, on the morning you’re starting out, along with any toiletries you haven’t packed yet because they are in use.
• Double check your list to make sure everything is packed.
• Pack your list. This is especially true if you are an extreme minimalist or if you tend to bring the kitchen sink. As you go through your journey, if there are items that you wish you had or items that you realize you didn’t need, make a note on the list. At the end of your journey save your notated list to use when planning your next adventure.
• Download maps of the areas you’ll be traveling so you have them available, even if you don’t have service. Traveling through mountain ranges or large nature preserves like national parks, your favorite mapping or GPS service might not be available, but if you have downloaded the maps, you’ll at least be able to navigate the old-fashioned way (with landmarks, street signs, and shadows).
• Load ‘er up! Load everything into your vehicle. As you pack items, think about whether you’re going to want to be able to access them easily while you’re driving or when you stop.

8. Go!

Every good adventure has a few unexpected twists and turns, so settle in and enjoy yourself, wherever your journey takes you. You have a plan, and, thanks to your research, when road closures, bad weather, or vehicle failures arise, you’ll be prepared. You’ll know the alternate route, you’ll know there’s a motel just a few miles past the campground so you don’t have to camp in the rain, and you’ll have AAA to tow to the nearest town if something happens to your transportation.

Have an awesome adventure!
Travel blue highways, fellow travellers!