part one

We are entering the road trip preparation phase as we near the end of Dan’s current contract, so I thought it would be fun to talk a bit more about how we prepare for big road trips. This time around will be another doozy as we drive from Arizona to the East coast. At this point, we’re hoping to head straight to New Hampshire and then off to wherever Dan’s next contract will be, but that could change based on his next contract so we have to wait and see. That said, we’re a bit limited in our planning for right now, but here are some of our tips and tricks when it comes to planning and preparing for a cross-country road trip.

Keep an eye out for part two of preparing for a cross country road trip!

decide on a timeline

For the sake of this post, I’m going to talk mainly about a point A to point B kind of a road trip. By that I mean minimal to no sightseeing, instead a strong emphasis on getting to your final location pretty much as quickly as possible. That said, one of the first things to decide when planning out a big road trip is your timeline. If you want to work in rest day(s) or sightseeing days, or if you are ok with choosing a slower route to be able to go through a particular state or city you want to see.

In general with our travel nursing road trips from contract to contract, we’ve focused on spending as little money as possible and getting to our final destination as quickly as possible. For the next road trip we may deviate from that slightly, but it will all depend on the when and where of Dan’s next contract. Another reason we have to make our road trips quick is our cats. They do quite well in the car all things considered, but they definitely don’t enjoy the long days in the car so we figure getting it done quickly is probably best for them. In terms of visiting friends and family along the way, it also feels a bit more challenging with pets because we don’t want to impose both ourselves and our cats.

For our previous cross country road trip from New Hampshire to Arizona, we made the trek in six days. This included a couple shorter driving days that acted as rest days, which we found we really appreciated when it came down to it. Looking at a straight show from where we started in New Hampshire to Phoenix, Google Maps estimated just about 40 hours of driving. Of course that doesn’t include any stops. Once we picked our stops and factored that in the number went up to 42 hours, which is honestly pretty great. If you’re trying to prioritize both saving money and speed, you have to be willing to give a little in each or either category as you see fit.

plan out your stops

Once you have a goal set for your timeline (how many days you want the trip to take), you can figure out what your stops will be. As I said before, I’m talking about a time-focused road trip where your stops are determined by your timeline, not the other way around. There’s room for margin here, you can give a little in the time category to allow for a specific stop you want to make, but for us we typically try to decide on a timeline first and then see what stops make the most sense for that timeline.

We did alter our stops a bit based on preference for our cross country road trip out west, but managed to do so while only adding two/three hours to our total driving time. Part of that decision was also practical as we made that road trip in December and didn’t have snow tires on our car. We figured heading south sooner rather than later would help us to avoid much bad weather so we altered our route to accommodate that. Check out my post on our 2022 cross country road trip from New Hampshire to Arizona for details on our stops.

Depending on what you’ve set as your timeline, at this point you can decide on if you want to take a rest day or two. We decided to incorporate a couple of “rest days” into our last road trip which we ending up being extremely grateful for. This can either look like staying two nights in one place and have a more true rest day, or adding in an extra stop to give yourself two shorter driving days. We decided to go for the later, and I think we’d both choose that option again if given the chance to go back. It worked really well for us, but again that was partially due to having the cats with us. If we didn’t have to factor in pets, we may have opted for the two nights in one place option to allow us to explore one of our stops more. We didn’t love leaving the cats alone in an unfamiliar place (often with plenty of breakables) for long, so we already felt a bit limited in our ability to sightsee.

book your stays

Now that you have an idea of how long your trip will take and where you’ll make your stops, it’s time to book your stays! At this point, you may realize you need to be a bit flexible as to your chosen stops depending on the area. We found that since one of our stops was a bit more remote, we had to be more flexible on location as we looked for something in the general area that was most on the way. By that I mean it may change exactly which town or city you plan to stop in depending on the hotel or Airbnb options available to you in that specific area.

I think I’ll talk more about this in a separate blog post, but in general if we have the cats with us (so all of our road trips from contract to contract) we tend to prefer Airbnbs. Over the years we’ve come to appreciate the consistency of hotels, even cheaper hotels, but when it comes to travelling with pets hotels get super expensive fast. We’re still doing research and have yet to look into smaller non-chain hotels or inns, but it seems that once you factor in most hotels exorbitant pet fees, Airbnbs almost always come out cheaper in the end.

how do you prepare for big road trips?