Road Trip: Two Months in Advance

A road trip can be stressful! I find that when planning anything, working out a schedule is the best for me. I can be a crazy planning list maker {sometimes it drives my husband nuts} but I research, plan, and schedule everything to a T…Or to the best that I can.

In my case, I will be having a twofer: my parents will be visiting and then I will be traveling out of state. So there’s a little bit more going on other than just the road trip, so I’m trying to square away my house for visitors, along with planning for a road trip.

Here is what I do two months in advance for the home:

• Focus on any organizing that might need to be done for a guest room. In our case we hadn’t completely “moved in” to the guest room, so getting that squared away is key. I have also wanted to get our garage completely organized/decluttered, so that is a project I’ve been focused on.

Here is what I do two months in advance for the road trip:

• Decide how many days you want to be gone on your trip and where you know you want {or have} to go. In our case, we’re traveling to Washington State and have five days.
• Scour Pinterest on any travel/trip information I can find. I pin them to a specific board, check on them later. Sometimes I find that I can get advice and tips that I wouldn’t have thought of or haven’t thought of before. This covers road trip apps, websites, how to pack for a long trip, cool places to visit on different routes, snacks, etc. If you’re interested in my travel Pinterest board, you can view it here.
• Print out any printables you might find that you like. Some go back a month or two, so this might be good to print now.
• Plan your route. Since I’m traveling with my parents, I went ahead and checked out the different routes myself, then asked my parents to do the same.
• Is there anything you absolutely want to see on the route? I really like the website Roadtrippers for this reason. I also like visiting TripAdvisor for ratings. Some things may seem cool…And not rate high. Some things may not seem cool…and get amazing ratings. Brainstorm where you’d like to go.
• Then make things more concrete. Google maps is great for this reason because you can see how long it takes to get to different destinations. This way you can divvy your trip up into different days depending on how long/far you’d like to drive each day. This can be tricky, because you might want to shorten/lengthen days depending on how often you’d like to stop, and you have to factor in how long you’ll want to stop. Short roadside attractions won’t be so bad, if you want to stop at a National Park like the Badlands, the Grand Canyon, etc you might want to make a short day so you have more time at the destination.
• This might be a good time too to make any hotel reservations that might book up quickly. If you’re going to be traveling over a holiday weekend, or during a prime traveling time, this would be a good idea.
• If you’re leaving pets, you’ll want to do research for where to board your pets if you need to do so. If you will be gone over a holiday, or again, in peak season, you might want to make reservations in advance.

What do you think? What would you do differently? Or add/subtract?

-M