Don’t want to get overwhelmed planning a multi-week road trip? Whether your trip is two weeks or two months, use this easy road trip planning hack.
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Hitting the open road with your family without solid road trip planning can be very risky. Spontaneity is great. There are many interesting detours across the highways and byways. You can end up spending days at many of the destinations and attractions along the way. But without some planning ahead of time, you run the risk of being two thousand miles away from home with only two days to get there! (Doable, but not enjoyable.)
Even the most experienced route planner of your group can easily get overwhelmed by all the possibilities. But, don’t throw in the towel. You just need to plan your route in manageable chunks.
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What?
Plan your trip in one-week increments. Regardless of what day your week begins on, look at your trip in seven day blocks of time. Plan out each week’s endpoint, not just that of the entire trip.
If you are planning a jam-packed week, your family will enjoy it more knowing they have a scheduled break. If you are a religious family, you can plan around Shabbos, Sunday at church, etc.
Just make sure that it is actually PLANNED. Pick the destination before you leave home and actually book something. This can be reserving a campground or hotel or making arrangements to get together with friends. You can even decide on a particular house of worship you plan to attend. Either way, ensure you have a weekly deadline and destination!
If your trip has you spending every night in a different place, this is the perfect opportunity to slow down the pace a bit. Pick a spot in which you can spend two nights to refresh, recharge, and regroup. (Not everyone is capable of sleeping just anywhere 😉)
Knowing, for example, that you are leaving Los Angeles and plan to return seven weeks later, going to Upstate New York midway, is very daunting–almost paralyzing. It also leaves too much space to “wander”. But, knowing that you plan to leave Detroit on Sunday morning and be in Minneapolis on Friday afternoon gives you a lot more freedom to plan that particular week. Break down each week of your trip this way.
Check out The Big Rocks of Route Planning for more road trip planning tips
Pick your weekly “endpoints” based on how much distance you think you’ll cover and geographically where you want to be. Disperse them somewhat equally across your entire route. If you want to spend the bulk of your week exploring the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it doesn’t make sense to plan to be in Denver by Friday afternoon–even if your best friend lives there. On the other hand, since you’re expected to be in Minneapolis, no matter how much fun your kids are having splashing around in Lake Superior, at some point they need to dry off and get going.
This may sound like it takes some of the fun out of the trip by cutting out the spontaneity or cutting short enjoyable activities. But, the positive experience of splashing around will surely be cancelled out by three days of round the clock non-stop driving to get home at the end of the trip.
How?
Use a calendar in conjunction with a map. I personally like to use paper and pencil for my route planning calendar, but an electronic calendar can work too. This can be done two different ways.
Method One:
You can map out your main destinations throughout the trip and try to break them down into week-long segments. Some weeks you may feel like covering more distance. Other weeks you may not cover much distance because there’s a lot you want to do in a geographically small area. Based on the map, approximate where you want to start/end each week. Pick these destinations to plan around as your weekly endpoints. Be sure to make your reservations.
Now, when ideas come up for other activities (either beforehand or even while on your trip), you know if/when you could do it based on where you need to be. If you want to go the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, you know it won’t work in your week that starts in Detroit and ends in Minneapolis. But, if you have a week that starts in Chicago and ends in Tulsa…Perfect!
Method Two:
This method has you map out your weekly endpoints first. If you have specific locations you want to use to break up the trip, then first plot these points on your map and fill them into your calendar at the end of each of your weeks. Here too, be sure to make your reservations.
Then fill in the rest of the calendar with your other activities based on where they fit. So, if you plan one week to end in Santa Fe and the next in Memphis followed by Baltimore, you now know where to put Cadillac Ranch, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Monticello.
Method Three:
This combines methods one and two. You can lay out your main destinations as well as some places you’d like to spend more time getting together with friends or just “chilling out”. See if those places naturally fit as your weekly “endpoints” along your route of other attractions.
Why?
I love knowing that I have a weekly destination and deadline for getting there. Having seven days between set destinations allows for flexibility while simultaneously ensuring that we are moving at a steady pace. No matter how amazing your entire trip is, if the end is a mad rush to get home (school, work, RV rental return, etc.), then that’s what will dominate the memories.
Furthermore, if you look at each week as its own unit of time, your children will too. We know that not everything will run smoothly (hope this isn’t news to you). By breaking things into separate units, and taking a break in between, you can also compartmentalize the “failures”. For example, “we almost ran out of gas sometime between Philadelphia and Cleveland” rather than “we almost ran out of gas last summer”.
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Don’t forget that things go well too. You can take advantage of the weekly downtime to ask your kids for trip highlights at the end of every week instead of just at the end of the trip! The more positive things they verbalize, the more positive memories you will be creating. This feedback can also help you tweak the upcoming weeks’ plans.
Your short-term memory can generally hold onto seven pieces of information (think: phone numbers, license plates, etc.). So this is also a great tool if you have trouble remembering everything you did, or the chronology of it. Instead of thinking through the entire trip, start with “Sunday morning we left _____ and went to…then we did…then…and Friday afternoon we arrived at _____”
Additionally, knowing you have a weekly break, means that no matter how go-go-go the week is, you know it’s not endless. Even if you have a night or two (or five) that you drove through the night to maximize the daytime hours, you know sleep is coming. And you know your kids will get at least one or two good nights of sleep each week.
Ensuring you get to your weekly endpoint, also ensures you’ve made it to the next week’s starting point–even if you have to rush to get there. So, whether you had a mechanical issue that delayed you or you decided to squeeze in the tallest waterfall in Canada, you’ll be back on track and on schedule for the rest of your trip. It’s like a weekly reset.
Let me know what your weekly destinations are and how you used these helpful tips to make multi-week road trip planning less daunting and overwhelming.
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