Tips for Long Haul Roadtrips

We’ve now completed two multiple-month-long car road trips in the USA and in one in the UK. We are often asked by friends, including those we visited on our most recent cross-country trip, how we manage our stuff and ourselves being away from a bed we call our own for so long. Here are some of our tips, for those who might be considering a long car road trip.

1. Everything has a place. Whether it’s in the car, carry-on or cooler, everything needs it place. If it does, it’s easy to tell if you’re missing something and keep your worst neurotic impulses at bay. True not only for car trips but for any kind of trip, when packing, we find it useful for everything having its place. Computer here, books there, underwear rolled up, shirts rolled or folded in packing cubes, etc. We also typically travel light, especially on plane trips with only one (or even no, depending on where we are going or for how long) checked bag, a small carry-on bag and/or a small backpack.

For a car trip, this need gets expanded to other items, which you can read about below.

2. Eating and Managing the weight gain. First off, you may find it strange, but we bring a scale along. This helps us monitor weight along the way so we aren’t shocked by a lot of weight added once we get home.

Part of the fun of trips, for us anyway, is to experience local foods and people and this is best accomplished in restaurants or bars.

While staying in Airbnbs or apartment hotels, we try to cook breakfast in and most dinners in (say 3 or 4 out of 5 nights) and go out for a couple of dinners and most lunches. Melissa brings along a few recipes which are relatively easy to make using cookware supplied in most Airbnbs and with ingredients that are generally available wherever we go (at least in North America and Western Europe).

We also have go-to options for eating out while on long driving days and not getting a lot of steps recorded on our Apple Watches, for example: Subway veggie subs or Starbucks Egg White Wraps.

All of this helps us feel good about those splurge meals or can’t-pass-up desserts.

3. Cooking Supplies. We bring along (or in the case of our road trip around the UK bought and left at our last Airbnb) a few items to help prepare meals. For example: a good knife. We aren’t talking super expensive knives, just a high quality $30 one. You’d be surprised how many Airbnb knives couldn’t cut through a wedge of cheese or loaf of bread if you tried. We also bring along a cutting board (just because you never know who sliced raw chicken on the one in the apartment without a good wash after), a vegetable peeler, a corkscrew and boxes of ziploc bags and some small Tupperware containers.

4. Keeping it cool. Since we often transport cold items from place to place, we have two small coolers we bring around. This is far better than one big one because you can fit them in the back seat or trunk around other items more easily. We have a 16″ long x 13″ tall x 11.5″ wide heavy duty Yeti cooler and a similarly sized Arctic One Titan cooler, and we bought some fantastic refreezabale “Freez Pacs” which we supplement with bags of ice as needed. Those Freez Pacs can keep stuff cold for a whole day, or even longer, so you can feel good about eating that yogurt, those eggs or chicken at the next stop. And there’s less water on your stuff and in the bottom of your cooler from leaky bags of ice.

5. Plastic bins. We have a couple of good sized (about 24″ long x 15″ tall x 13″ wide) plastic bins. One is a portable pantry which goes inside at every stop where we have a kitchen. It holds canned items, pasta, oatmeal, cooking spray, ziploc bags and the cooking supplies we bring along, etc. In keeping with the “everything has a place” theme, it is always packed the same way, so we know where everything is.

On our last trip, we used a reusable wine bottle tote bag we got at a liquor store to hold “cylindrical objects”, like the brown sugar, hot sauce and cooking spray, because each pocket of the bag kept things upright.

We also have another large plastic bin where we store things that don’t need to come inside at each stop. It holds things like books to read or books already read, extra medications or first aid supplies, jackets we might need certain places but not everywhere, etc.

6. Slow Travel. We go slow. By design. We try to max out at 5-6 hours of travel time (excluding stops) or less per day. We map our trips out way in advance (as I wrote about here) so that we can really spend time and check things out and feel like we lived in a place, if only for a day or two.

Sometimes we break our rules and go longer but more often we will go 2-4 hours so we can travel at an easy pace and make stops along the way and enjoy our destinations more.

7. Slippers and Other Shoes. Yes, we travel with slippers. Mostly the kind hotels might give away. I challenge you to walk around your hotel room in white socks for a couple of hours and not be a little turned off by the shade of grey or black they turn. Those carpets just don’t get deep cleaned.

We also have various types of footwear packed in the car, which mostly stay there, for the various types of activities we might do: hike, beach, fancier restaurant.

8. Take the Scenic Route. We look for highways off interstate to see a place and its true character. Most US interstates look the same to either side, so we try to get off of them and take the blue highways. And, yes, we still use a paper atlas to check for those little dots indicating a scenic route next to roads.

Locals’ tips are another good way to explore and experience things you may not find on a blog or in a guidebook. We love tips from locals. A lot of Airbnb hosts (the good ones anyway) have tips or recommendations for things to do and some even reach out to see if you want suggestions. Take them. Chatting with locals or waitresses or bartenders is also a great way to get suggestions.

9. Personal and healthcare. Stuff happens. You get sick or need to find a dentist or an urgent care. While it sucks, we try to be flexible and not let it get us down.

We’ve now sampled healthcare in France, Italy, Canada, and of course the U.S. and Portugal and all of our experiences have been good, overall.

Haircuts may also be needed and while it’s easier for me with my short and thinning hair, we’ve both made stops to get our hair done and keep things looking coiffed.

10. Leave No Trace. Maybe it goes without saying but we try to leave each hotel room or airbnb just as clean (or in some cases cleaner) than we found them. We value our guest ratings and don’t want to be those people that create a ton of work and headaches for the cleaners. Good karma… pass it on.

By doing some of these things, planning well and in advance we find that we can get the most out of each day and just enjoy the ride.

I hope this helped at least one person out there.