Long road trip tips drivers#
Long road trip tips registration#
Long road trip tips free#

Classics include Route 66, of course the 3,600-mile Great Northern Route tracking U.S. Some of the best trips are more about the road you travel than some final stop. Consider an epic road trip that’s all about the route. And if you’re headed west to Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, you might detour to South Dakota’s Black Hills to see the Crazy Horse monument, Devil’s Tower and Mount Rushmore - not to mention the offbeat local restaurants and small towns you can find if you slow down a bit.Ħ. It’s perhaps too easy to get locked in on your journey’s ultimate end, at the risk of missing worthwhile secondary stops. There are some fantastic museums and monuments, for instance (in the Midwest consider the National Veterans Memorial and Museum in Columbus, Ohio, among many others). It also can't hurt to throw a blanket in the trunk if you're traveling in winter. But also don’t forget a road atlas, cellphone charger, small amount of cash and coins for tolls, first aid kit, jumper cables, spare tire and tire-repair kit, one gallon per person of potable water, and a small cooler with nonperishable snacks, Dunham says.

Long road trip tips registration#

Pack a roadside emergency kit.īring your license, vehicle registration and insurance documents, of course. The most common repairs done at AAA-approved garages are electrical ones, especially involving battery failure.

Long road trip tips drivers#

“At AAA, we tell drivers to make a good ‘BET’ to reduce the risk of a roadside emergency by having a vehicle’s Battery, Engine and Tires checked by a trusted mechanic before embarking,” Molina says. Other handy apps. Once on the road, consider HotelTonight, for last-minute lodging deals Waze for traffic and road condition updates and Spotify for music and podcasts to stay entertained and informed, suggests Jessica Dunham, a Phoenix travel writer and author of The Open Road: 50 Best Road Trips in the USA. And don’t forget old-fashioned guidebooks, especially for armchair dreaming. Visually checking his route on the page provides a broad overview so he can see interesting sites that might be just off the road.

Long road trip tips free#

Road trippers. For an even more complete and focused tool, consider the free Roadtrippers website and app, which brags of planning 25 million trips totaling 16.9 billion miles.īooks and road atlases. “If you’re exploring, just seeing the lay of the land, I like the road atlas,” Revolinski says. Kevin Revolinski, a travel writer in Madison, Wisconsin, and author of Backroads & Byways of Wisconsin, calls Google Maps a matchless mix of power and simplicity.

The tool also allows you to tailor routes to avoid tolls or highways, add detours, identify sights along the way, route around traffic jams and more. With the free phone app and website, drivers can select a starting point and a destination and receive automatically generated step-by-step driving directions. Google Maps. Travelers consistently give Google’s platform top marks. Take advantage of planning tools.Īmong the wide range of apps, websites, atlases, guidebooks and other tools for road-trippers, a few standouts: It’s important, for example, to book campgrounds far in advance if you're heading to popular places such as national parks. The best time to start planning is now - or as early as possible, stresses Ashleigh Rudolph, founder of Tahoe, California-based Pine Road Travel, which plans custom road trips for RVers. We asked Molina and other travel experts for their best advice for road. “Stay up to date on the weather forecast and road conditions, and make sure your vehicle is ready.”

“Before hitting the road it’s important you properly plan your route,” says George Molina, a San Antonio-based travel adviser with AAA Texas. But traveling by car also requires a little research and preparation. A good road trip invites spontaneity - allowing for stops to investigate a tasty-looking café or enjoy an eye-catching vista when the opportunity strikes.