Howdy All, in today’s blog post I’m going to detail the steps I take when I plan a road trip. This has worked well for many trips, with my two biggest being in 2018 and 2021. These two trips combined for 27 states, not including Texas. My 3 best friends and I embarked on them 3.5 years apart. The first one was a tour of the west coast during the summer of 2018 that lasted almost 3 weeks. The second one was a tour of the East Coast in the winter of 2021-2022 that lasted about the same amount of time.
First thing’s first: The route
Obviously, to plan a road trip, it helps to know where you want to go and what you want to see. Some road trips are in fact better left unplanned. For me, as much as I love and romanticize the idea of an open-ended trip, I always plan at least the big parts of the trip so that I can make it where I need to go on time and make sure that I’m not left without a place to stay. I still generally leave the days open to whatever we feel like doing, but getting the big stuff out of the way saves a lot of stress and makes it easier to plan smaller stuff and also budget. I will usually leave my travel day legs open as long as we’re staying on the interstate because there is usually an abundance of hotels.
Next: splitting up the route
Once you have an idea of where you’re going, you need to look at logistics to figure out how long you can spend in each place vs. how much time you will need to spend driving. A lot of this will honestly depend on your driving style. For me, I typically eat a small, quick breakfast on driving days. I’ll either stop for lunch or dinner at a sit-down place, but the other meal will usually be somewhere quick that you can be in and out in 30 minutes or less. As such, my upper limit of driving in a day is roughly a 13 hour distance. I try to keep these longer days at the beginning or end of the trip so that I’m not as tired in the middle, and they’re somewhat necessary to get to a lot of good places from Texas.
Some people, however, like to stop at more places than I might find interesting, or spend more time eating or resting, etc. If that applies to you, then a 13 hour distance might take 2-3 days instead of 1, which is totally fine. You just have to pick and choose some of the things you want to see and is it worth going faster or slower so that you can see them. This part of the planning process could easily affect your route if you’re on a time constraint. You might plan out each leg and realize it’s hard to see all the little things you’d like to see at the fast pace you’d like to go, or maybe you won’t make it to California in 3 days at the slow pace you’d like to go.
For the trips above these were the itineraries:
Trip 1:
Day 1: San Angelo, TX to Flagstaff, AZ. ~13 hours
Day 2: Flagstaff to Grand Canyon South Rim, then to LA. ~9 hours but felt longer due to fatigue and starting early
Days 3-7ish: Stayed in LA, saw as much as we could
Day 8: Drove to Little Basin State Park with a stop in Monterey for the aquarium. ~7 hours I believe
Days 9-11: Stayed in San Francisco. Drove 1.5hours the first day through the hills but then left the car in the garage.
Day 12: Drove from SF to Crescent City, CA pretty much all along the coast. ~9 hours, probably one of the longest driving days of my life due to the nature of the roads but it was a beautiful drive.
Days 13-16: Drove to Seattle from Crescent City, then stayed in Seattle for the rest of the time. ~7 hours driving on the interstate.
Day 17: Drove from Seattle to Yellowstone national park and spent the night camping. ~13 hours driving
Day 18: Drove around Yellowstone seeing stuff for around 4 hours, then drove south to Riverton, WY and spent the night. ~7-8 hours of driving including sightseeing
Day 19: Drove to Denver via Rocky Mountain National Park. ~8 hours driving
Day 20: Drove home from Denver. ~10 hours driving
On this trip, we saw A TON of stuff in the Western US. We would have seen Yosemite as well if it hadn’t been on fire at the time, but the things we saw instead were very cool and things I probably would not have known about without making this detour so I am glad that we did. However, some people probably read that itinerary and go “wow, you really skipped a lot of great stuff.” Those people are absolutely right, and if given the time I would love to go back and explore a lot of that stuff (and some of it, I have).
Trip 2:
Day 1: Denton, TX to about an hour east of Nashville, TN. Stopped in Memphis at the Bass Pro Shops pyramid and Nashville at Prince’s hot chicken, so was a long day of travel. ~11 hours of driving
Day 2: Drove from there to Arlington, VA. Stopped to eat dinner in Fairfax, VA. Long but pretty drive through the Appalachians. ~9 hours.
Days 3-5: Stayed in Washington DC, left the car in the garage.
Day 6: Drove to NYC, with a stop in Philadelphia to see Independence hall, Liberty Bell, grab a cheesesteak, and see the Rocky steps at the art museum. Philly was really cool and would have been great to see more of it but this stop was also long enough to see a lot of the highlights. ~3 hours driving.
Days 7-9: Stayed in NYC, did most of the normal tourist things, and also did the NYE Midnight Run through Central Park. No Driving.
Day 10: Drove to Boston, stopped at Pez museum in Connecticut (unplanned) and stopped at Newport, RI for some good seafood. ~3-4 hours driving.
Days 11-13: Stayed in Boston
Day 14: Drove up to Portland, ME to eat Lobster rolls and look at some lighthouses, then turned around and headed for Burlington, VT. ~7-8 hours of driving.
Day 15: Decided to stay in Burlington, VT because there was a big snow, went sledding and to a college hockey game and enjoyed the day there.
Day 16: Drove to Buffalo, NY and spent the night there. ~7 hours of driving
Day 17: Went to a Buffalo Bills game and spent the night in Buffalo again
Day 18: Drove from Buffalo to Pittsburgh and saw downtown Pittsburgh.
Day 19: Drove from Pittsburgh to Forrest City, AR via Cincinnati, Nashville, and Memphis. Stopped in Nashville and Cincinnati to eat. ~12 hours driving
Day 20: Drove home. ~5 hours driving.
Once again, missed a lot, but also saw a lot. On this one, you may have noticed we didn’t do as many long days driving. That was partially just because the northeastern US isn’t as spread out, and partially because this trip was taken in winter with less certain conditions and less daylight.
Third step: Booking lodging (if needed)
This one depends on where your trip is. Basically, if you’re not going to a city or camping at a popular park, you probably don’t need to actually book anything or plan as meticulously. You can just get in the car and drive as near or far as you want and 9/10 times there will be a decent hotel nearby. However, if and when you do book lodging, I tend to go with Booking.com. They have a good selection, easy to use website, and the genius program actually gets you some decent discounts or extra amenities once you have enough stays. Generally, I like to only book properties that let me pay on arrival, and have a free cancellation as close to my arrival as possible. The reason for this is that plans can obviously change, and it’s nice to have the flexibility if you don’t make it to your destination or want to change your plans. For national parks these days, you often have to book way in advance, pretty much whenever they release a new batch of sites. You can try to do first-come, first-serve, but you usually have to be there at 6 or 7 am and the hotels nearby are often overpriced.
Final step: Make your budget
You could easily switch this step and the last step, but I put them in this order because if you’re booking in advance then that will make one cost fixed. This will largely depend on the type of car you have, how much you care to spend at restaurants, and what type of lodging you stay in. When I plan a road trip for my friends and I, I assumed $30/day in food money outside of cities, and $50/day in cities for our 2018 trip. For our 2021 trip, I added about $5/day for driving days, and $15/day for cities. The increase mostly covered us, but did not quite include drinks if anybody ordered them.
For lodging, I assume around $180-200/night in a city, if not more like $250 but just depends. It sounds like a lot but when there’s 4 of you willing to share beds it is actually cheaper than hostels in the US most of the time. In more rural areas, I assume $100-140/night in areas outside of cities. This price range will usually get you a decent place in a decent area and those estimations include taxes and fees. In SF and Seattle, we did go ahead and get hostels because they were really cool and great price for the area they were in (like right across from Pike Place market in Seattle). We also saved a lot of money by staying with people we knew where we could, though that is highly situational.
For gas, I like to round down on my MPG, and up on the $/gal. If you live in and/or are staying in either of the coasts, probably add $0.50-$1/gal onto the national average and you will be pretty close. If you are not, however, you might get away with just budgeting the national average $/gal. On MPG, I just round down to the nearest 5 (so assumed 30MPG on my corolla, and 15MPG on the truck). Then I take the estimated mileage from google maps, divide the mileage by MPG to get how many gallons I would use, and multiply that by the $/gal to get the total cost of gas for the trip. On both of these trips, we came in under budget on gas money, which was good because then we had some leftover cushion at the end.
I typically will also include $2-500 in spending money just in case there are things we didn’t plan on doing or souvenirs we want to buy and things like that. Budgeting this way is how we were able to make it work for 4 just graduated high schoolers with near minimum-wage jobs. We budgeted 9-12 months in advance and went to work saving up for it. I will say, it was much easier sticking to the budget when we had camping stops and also before we were able to drink. Drinks and other fun things do add up quite quickly, so it can be good to add even more cushion to the budget.
Conclusion
This was just a quick recap of how I have planned my trips in the past. Obviously, this may not work for everybody, but it has worked great for my friends and I and helped us afford to go on trips even when we were relatively broke. I have also done some trips where I just get in the car and go, and they are just as fun and you can easily some random, cool stuff all over the country. Hopefully you were able to gain some inspiration or learn something from this post. Thanks for reading!
Chasing the Texas Sun, an odyssey through Big Bend, Marfa, and the Davis Mountains
Leave a Reply