Site icon Sancerres at Sunset

How to Plan a Solo Road Trip

Leslie Carbone
Planning a Solo Road Trip

Solo travel is daring, liberating, rejuvenating.  It feels a little bit naughty, like getting away with something.

You go when you want to go, where you want to go.  You eat when you want to eat, what you want to eat.  You can sleep when you want, and get up when you want, and you get the whole bed.  You can stay at a luxury hotel or a campground; it’s your choice.  You get to indulge your own interests, no matter how nerdy, or boring, or eclectic someone else might think them.  If you want to plan your trip around seeing a historic museum, a national park, and a baseball game, you can.  You don’t have to convince anyone why they matter, and you don’t have to compromise.

You can’t live this way all time, and it wouldn’t be good for you anyway.  It’s better to have people in your life, people you want to put first.  But every once in a while, it’s good to get away from others, so you can restore yourself.  It’s rare, and that’s what makes it special.

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, click here.

Road trips are adventurous, raw, and so intriguing they’ve inspired movies from It Happened One Night to Thelma & Louise.

You have flexibility.  You stop when there’s something interesting to see or do, or when you just want a break.  You stay in one place as long as you want, and you move on to the next one whenever you want.  You don’t have a plane to catch, and you don’t have to be molested to get on board.  Your car is your cocoon; you can load it with whatever you’re going to want.

But the trip isn’t about the car; it’s about you and the road and where the road takes you and where you choose to follow it.

And when you put solo travel and road trip together, it’s magic. It’s a rare and nurturing oasis of freedom. It’s life on your terms.

And good magic needs a lot of behind-the-scenes planning and preparation. After five fabulous weeks on the road, here’s my comprehensive list of

Road-Trip Essentials

1) A Loose Plan

Freedom and flexibility are the glory of the solo road trip. You don’t want to over-plan. But you have to have some idea of where you want to go and what you want to do.

Make a short list of your top things to do.

Mine included:  Southfork Ranch in Texas and a Salem Red Sox game in Virginia, as well as the Everything Food Conference in Utah. I also wanted to go to all five of the contiguous states I hadn’t already visited (North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon).

Rough draft your route.

You can do this online or on a paper map or both.  Plot your to-see points, and trace a route that covers them.  Use it to gauge how long it should take to drive from point to point and to plan stops on the way.  But remember: it’s just a rough plan; adjust it continually as you go along.

At the end of every driving day, after I checked in to my hotel room and cleaned out the car, I went online to figure out where to stop next and what I’d like to see on the way — a small museum, a historic site, a local park.  I made reservations if it looked like rooms were filling up, but the best driving days were the ones when I knew I could go until I wanted to stop.

Decide how much you want to drive daily and weekly.

I settled on roughly six hours per day, five days per week.  I thought this would be a fairly light schedule, especially after years of driving from northern Virginia to my parents’ home in Massachusetts.  I’ve seen some travel bloggers write about driving 12 hours in a day, and great for them if that’s what they like.  But for me, the point of the journey was the journey, and I wanted to spend more time exploring out of the car than in it.  I also knew that I’d have daily and weekly blogging responsibilities, that I like wearing frequently washed clothes, and that God gave us a weekly day of rest for a reason.  As it turned out, even this light and flexible schedule became pretty tiring after five weeks, and I started slowing down by the time I made it back to the southeast.

Write up a nightly to-do list.

When you’re road tired, and possibly hungry, you don’t want to keep asking yourself, “What do I need to remember to do next?” Write down a fool-proof list. Mine included:

Outline a basic daily schedule.

You can make day to day changes when they’re called for, but having a schedule will help you stay on track.  Mine looked like this:

A Day in the Life of a Travel Blogger on the Road

Prepare for departure from home.

An organized approach to a few simple tasks will help make your departure much smoother.

Set up a packing station a few days ahead of time.

The earlier you can gather up the things you’ll be taking, the less stressed you’ll be as departure day nears. I used my small den for this, so that the growing piles wouldn’t drive me crazy.

Pay your bills.

Set up automatic payments. Don’t forget:

Clean thoroughly.

You don’t want to return to an untidy home (and you don’t want any multi-legged squatters moving in while you’re away).  I set aside a full day for this.

Plan for a short first day of driving.

Leaving can be the most stressful part of a trip.  Give your self extra time to double-check that you’ve packed the prescriptions and turned off all the appliances (you can even snap pictures of them if you’ll want the reassurance).  Make a one-night reservation at an inexpensive highway hotel; just make sure it’s far enough away that you won’t be tempted to turn home to get that one last thing you wish you’d packed.

Prepare to come home.

This is part of preparing to leave, so that it won’t haunt you near the end of the journey.  I brought along a re-entry folder, for some paperwork regarding things I’d need to handle upon my return.  Toward the end of the trip, I also planned for a short last day of driving, so that if there were any problems at home, I’d have time and energy to cope with them.  I reserved what I hoped would be a luxury hotel room for my last few days on the road, so that I’d be coming home feeling rested and so that the last stretch of the trip wouldn’t seem like more of a downer than necessary.

Be flexible.

You know that plan I had to see five new states?  I only got to three of them before I decided that the last two would just be too much for this trip.  On the other hand, I visited lots of places that I would never have planned ahead, just because they looked intriguing, from the Museum of Space History in New Mexico to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.  Go with the road and go with your gut.

2) A Priority on Safety

You matter.  Your safety matters.  Take it seriously.

Have your car checked out before you leave.

I did this a few weeks early so there’d be time for any necessary repairs.

Bring:

Establish your safety rules.

It’s easy to make wrong decisions in the moment when you don’t have firm rules in place.  Mine were:

3) Lodging that Suits Your Style

Lots of travellers are comfortable at hostels and campgrounds.  If you’re one of them, you might want to skip this part.  I prefer luxury hotels, but they’re not practical for one-night stops along the road.  For road trips, I like a combination of casino, casual-convenient, and extended-stay hotels.

Casino Hotels

Casino hotels are a great option for women travelling alone, because:

They’re safe. There are cameras and security personnel everywhere. In casino towns, you can even walk alone at night, because they’re all lit up, and there are lots of cops around.

They’re often inexpensive.  They’re not in business to make money on the rooms, so you can usually stay for cheap or even for free.  They usually have reasonably priced or even complementary valet parking.  The big ones have rewards credit cards without annual fees, making them a better bet than most travel credit cards, and you also earn points redeemable as cash with their player’s cards.

There’s always something to do.  There are restaurants and bars, spas and pools, and of course table games and slot machines.

These casino brands have hotels in multiple locations:

Caesars

Caesars has properties all over the country. Along with its namesake, its brands include Horseshoe, Harrah’s, Bally’s, and others.  Its properties range from luxury to well-at-least-it’s-comped. Its rewards program is Caesars Rewards.

Boyd

Boyd Gaming has 18 midscale properties in Nevada, the South, and the midwest.  Most have unique names. Its rewards program is B Connected.

El Dorado

El Dorado has 26 midscale properties in the South, the West, and the midwest.  Along with its namesake, its affiliated brands include Tropicana, Isle, Lady Luck, and others, with independent rewards programs.  As of this writing, El Dorado has announced plans to acquire Caesars next year.

Select-Service Hotels

These properties tend to be easily accessible from the road.  They’re often called limited-service hotels, because they lack upscale amenities like spas and bars, valet service, and shopping esplanades.  But they do have what long-term road trippers want:  big open parking lots, gyms, breakfast in the morning and cookies at night and coffee and tea all day, and usually microwaves and refrigerators in the rooms.

My go-to brand has long been Hampton by Hilton, because they’re ubiquitous and reliably clean and comfortable and reasonably priced.  Hilton’s rewards program is HHonors.

I did have one nice stay at the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson in Northwood, Iowa. Two big plusses for this brand are cookies all day and a wonderful lending library system whereby road trippers can take a book at one property and return it at the next.  Radisson’s frequent-travel program is Radisson Rewards.

Extended-Stay Hotels

For longer stops, I prefer extended-stay hotels.  Like their select-service counterparts, they offer complimentary breakfast in the morning and sometimes receptions in the evening.  The rooms have fully equipped kitchens with real dishes and glassware, things you miss after weeks on the road.

My favorite brand is Residence Inn by Marriott.  They’re reliably clean and reasonably priced. The gyms and laundry rooms are large and well equipped.  The televisions are Netflix-ready for use with your own account.  They have a complimentary same-day grocery-shopping service. And there’s microwave popcorn in the kitchen, which I never have at home, but can’t resist when I’m curling up with a Netflix flick after a long day of driving or writing or laundry or all three. Marriott’s rewards program is Bonvoy.

4) Food

In my vision for the trip, I thought I’d be alternately dining at local haunts and having happy-hour bites with my single glass of wine at hotel bars.  In reality, more often than not, I made myself a small charcuterie board in the hotel room, washed down with water, after I’d finished the tasks on my to-do list.  Here’s my list of groceries to pack:

5) A Wardrobe for All Seasons

Be prepared for all kinds of weather.  After five weeks ranging from hot sun to wet snow (including both in Salt Lake City), here’s what I wish I’d packed:

Footwear

Basics

I love Talbots for inexpensive separates that are easy to notch up with the right accessories.

Dresses

Outerwear

Hats

Accessories

Activewear

Sleepwear

Jewelry

I hate worrying about losing my jewelry when I travel, so I bring only a few good pieces that I can wear together:

Laundry Supplies

6) Bags and Baggage

7) A Fitness Plan

You have to be intentional about fitness or it will be too easy to blow off.  I resolved before I left to spend an hour exercising every morning before I hit the road, unless I knew I’d be doing significant movement during the day.  Most days I either used a treadmill in the hotel gym or went for a long walk in the fresh air.  I also did ten crunches every morning while the coffee was brewing and lifted weights once or twice each week.  I brought along my favorite work-out DVDs, yoga mat, hand weights, ankle weights, and resistance bands — and didn’t take them out of the car once.

The good news:  I hit my 10,000-step goal every day, and usually far exceeded it, according to my fitbit, and I lost eight pounds.  The bad news:  It wasn’t enough; I lost muscle tone because I didn’t do enough strength training.

If I’d known then what I know now, here’s what I’d do:

8) Money

Rewards Credit Cards

There are a lot of rewards credit cards out there, and it’s worth selecting a few that will help maximize what you can reap back from your travels (and put toward your next journey!)  Here’s the balance that worked for me:

Cash

Some people don’t feel comfortable with a lot of cash; some people only feel comfortable with a lot of cash.  Bring the amount you feel comfortable with.  Just make sure to carry enough $5s and $1s for tips.  And bring quarters for laundry; most hotels can sell you a roll, but I wouldn’t count on it.  Don’t forget your ATM card(s).

9) Electronics and Entertainment

Your list will depend somewhat on your personal preferences, but here are my road-trip must-haves:

10) The Right Mind-Set

A solo road trip is a wonderful opportunity, but it can be physically and emotionally grueling. Driving hours a day for weeks is tiring, and there’s no one to take the wheel when you want a break.

Things will go wrong.  You may get lost; I took an hour-long detour through the Mojave Desert in California because I overshot my turn to Laughlin, Nevada.  You may get scared; I’ve developed a weird phobia of overpasses when they’re so high that I can’t see the ground.  You may get lonely; I missed my late mother, with whom I took my previous cross-country road trips, and I cried from Arizona to New Mexico.

You have to set your mind to accept these kinds of things before you go.  You have to allow yourself to feel emotional swings without being overwhelmed by them.  You have to believe that the rewards are worth the risks. (And if you can’t, that’s okay, and it’s better to realize it; long-term solo road tripping is not for everybody, and there are lots of other ways to travel.)

I never questioned. No matter how sad or scared I became, I loved being on the road, and being on my own.

And I slept better than I have in years.

Read about the road trip here:

 

Exit mobile version