General Opinion on road trips
 

In my experience I have liked road trips and vacations in general better, when I don't cram too much in. Try to focus on a couple of areas/ attractions and really enjoy them. Just a Sunday morning thought. :-)

I LOVE driving, and have done lots of road trips. I think I really enjoy going in off-season where I don't need to pre-book hotels and worry about finding accomodations.

The best thing about road-trips is flexibility. If I already have all hotels set, then I lose huge part of that. Unfortunately, these days I do tend to do that more as it's often cheaper to prebook a 4* hotel on Priceline than walking in to a motel.

I guess the ideal solution will be affordable wireless internet access. That way I can wait until same afternoon before bidding on Priceline for the night.

If you mean on here, it seems folks don't realize the Vastness of the West. They all want to go 500 miles a day instead of 100. They have to be whizzing by all the sights.
I say slow down and drive the Blue Highways.
That's where America is.

Good points both bbq and rkk. :-)

Hi trippinkpj, road trips IMO are really fun when I haven't driven over four hours in a day. I prefer to not make reservations along the way so if an area is delightful you don't have to leave because you have reservations somewhere else.

Agree with you about not cramming to much into a day. That is not my idea of a vacation.

I think a lot of it depends on who you're taveling with and what kind of car you have. I've had some good experiences and bad experiences on road trips. I prefer to travel with someone who is spontaneous and adventurous - a go-with-the-flow type of person, as opposed to someone who has a tight agenda, hotels all planned out, or worse - someone with awful musical tastes!

I love road trips! Our favorite way to do it is to drive somewhere a couple of days away (in the midwest, everything is a couple of days away!) and then stay in one spot for three or four days. Then we usually move on to another place a couple of days away and stay there for three or four days.

For example, we've gone to Frisco, CO twice, staying four nights each time. The first time we then headed south, spending a night in Ouray, one in Mesa Verde and three in Santa Fe before heading home. The second time we took in an afternoon Rockies game and then headed into Wyoming. We spent the night, visited Devil's Tower and then drove to Custer State Park for a three day stay. From there we went to The Badlands for a night before heading home.

We've done two similar trips out east. It may not work for everyone. But we like the combination of covering a lot of ground but still having a chance to stay put for a few days at a time.

I too love road trips. My ideal vacation would be to grab say $2000 and mosey around til I spent $1000 then come back a different way and spend the remainder. Unfortunately, I'm married to a guy who loves to get somewhere fast, as in, "We shaved 5.4 minutes of our 430 mile drive this time". It's awful. I sometimes travel with other people to get things my way but DH is in many other ways a fantastic travelling companion so I guess I'll just have to put up with it.

We've done vacations by car (is that the same as a road trip?), but I try not to drive more than a couple hours a day once we've gotten to our general destination. I don't like spending time in the car.

I prefer to have hotel reservations so we don't have to waste vacation time hunting down a place to stay.

I envision a road trip as more spontaneous. Just hop in the car and point it in a general direction.
Doesn't always happen that way, but that's what I remember my dad doing when I was a wee speout, and now I try to do day trips that way.
Harder to follow that route with school age kids, but still.....

wee sprout

Shaz60, that sounds like my DH, LOL. I tend to agree with the 4 hour rule, although sometimes you have days were you have to get longer mileage in. I can put up with an every other day, a longer drive. It's when you are trying to drive 400 + miles and then see a lot of sites. It's exausting, LOL.
Yes, this post was "inspired" by some of the posts on this board. :-)

By roadtrip do you mean having things planned and reservations made with the transportation being an automobile? Or do you mean being spontaneous and going wherever the road takes you? Or maybe both?

The older I get, the more I appreciate traveling with things pretty much planned out and reservations made.

That being said, I also love traveling spontaneously with very little planned. When I was a kid my family traveled (camping) across the entire United States. Then we moved to Europe and took our camping equipment with us. During our years there, many of our weekends and vacations were spent just randomly driving, sometimes camping and sometimes staying in little guesthouses along the way. I have so many happy memories; camping by the North Sea in a rainstorm, swimming in freezing Swedish lakes, sleeping under an eiderdown comforter in the Swiss Alps. I appreciate the courage my parents had to be so spontaneous and travel like that with 4 kids!

My husband and I now usually travel with pretty well defined plans, as we have become somewhat picky about where we stay. We have, however, had some wonderful unplanned roadtrips; 3 weeks driving throughout Ireland, and another time we spent 3 weeks driving through Finland and Sweden - stopping when we found a place that appealed.

We still do take lots of "drives", some of which last several days. We plan, one of these days to drive across country. We love driving and we love roadtrips!!

I like road trips, but I don't lollygag. We use long car trips as a means to get to places that we'd never fly to. Like Dyersville, Iowa, or Little Rock, Arkansas or wherever. Part of the fun is piecing together the itinerary. However, we are guilty of driving as much as 800 miles a day. Sometimes, places like West Texas don't have that much you want to see.

I like to do some planning and some spontanaity. I agree with Nevermind, I like my lodging planned, and then be flexible on the rest.

I agree on West Texas, and I may do that trip later this year (my daughter lives in Austin/ I'm in CA). I think if it's a serious we want to get from point A to B in the shotest period of time, that's one thing. But if you want to "sight-see", it's much more manageable with lower mileage.

I posted a trip report awhile back, but I think it's fun with road trips to plan around a theme. Last year we did Angels farm teams and other baseball stuff, like the Negro League Museum and final year of Busch Stadium. I've also considered other kinds of baseball trips, and trips to see Presidential Libraries or certain state parks. I think those kind of anchors help a lot.

I love road trips and prefer to really get a good feel for an area rather than just glancing from the freeway. For example, I will never understand why people travel all the way to California to race from SF to Yosemite to Big Sur to LA in one week!Any of those places is a destination in itself and should be treated as such. No matter what they say, if they're only spending one day, they haven't really "seen it." How do I know? I've lived in California all my life, been to each for weeks of my life, too many times to count and still haven't seen it all!That's my opinion for the day! :)

Well said moneygirl. Those "rushing through a packed agenda" type of posts like what you describe is exactly what prompted this post. :-)

I like a road trip where we can relax and take side trips. I don't like gift shops but I do like to stop off and see small towns in different parts of the country. Unless you need to get somewhere that you can't fly to, it doesn't make sense to me to drive 1,500 miles and only see the major highways - they all look alike.

Lena, that is what I like about road trips. Seeing small towns, having lunch in some small cafe, checking out the area. And I agree with you moneygirl, to get from point A to point B is not my idea of fun as I hate to spend all day in the car driving on the freeway. To get to a location I prefer to fly.

This thread is giving me spring fever even if spring has not arrived in California. It is really raining in the Sacramento Valley.

rkkwan, you are right. Flexibility is the secret to a great road trip. I like the part about not planning ahead. My wife and I once drove from Toronto to Phoenix. It took six weeks to get there. The only thing that we knew when we started out was that we were going to Phoenix and we had time. We decided day to day where to go. By the time we got home we had hit Niagara Falls, Sault Ste Marie, Mackinaw Island, Mall of the Americas, Custer State Park, Black Hills(Mt Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, Deadwood), Yellowstone NP, Grand Tetons, Rocky Mountain NP, Pikes Peak, Carlsbad Caverns and Tombstone. What inspired that trip was one my parents took a few years earlier when they left for a three day trip to Lake Tahoe and came home 3 1/2 months later, buying clothes on the road because they only packed for three days. They hit most of southern Canada and the US on that trip. I knew I would never be happy until I did a road trip with no time limit and no itinerary. IT WAS FANTASTIC.
((D))8-)

We absolutely love road trips. Grew up taking them, visiting all 48 lower states by the time i was 12. Still did the trips to europe and disney, but summers were in the old chevy wagon crossing the country.

I married a certifiable beach bum, but soon converted him when we took our first cross-country road trip in 1996. We thought it would be "THE" one and only out west trip, so tried to do alot in a major loop from coast to coast, approx. 7,000 miles in just under 4 weeks. Happily, it wasn't our last, we've done nine cross country road trips since - each between 6 - 8,000 miles, each just under 4 weeks.

We're like Caph, we like covering lots of ground, then staying put for 2-3 nights. We plan each night's lodging but still leave wiggle room for changes.

We started on the 'see a little of alot' routine when we thought our first cross country trip would be the last, and loved it! Since we've been fortunate to take nine similar trips, we've been able to sample most of the country, returning to our favorites for additional time on the way to exploring new areas. If i had to do it again, i might focus more on one region at a time because as others have said, we could have spent much more time at many / most places!
But thats not how it worked out for us and i'm not at all sorry in the least. They've all been spectacular trips in every way.

In fact, we're currently trying to squeeze in one more road trip with our kids - our 10th - tougher to coordinate each year and yet somehow more fun. However, this summer, we may have to fly and do the rental car thing... :( Did i mention i want my babies back? Enjoy yours while they're little; they grow way too fast! :(