Travel nursing is complicated and while having a car is pretty much a necessity, it also adds it’s own complications. Here are our car tips for travel nursing!

What we keep in the car

These are all things we kept in the car previous to starting travel nursing, but that we’re extra glad to have on hand now!

• car vacuum (especially for road trips with the cats & their litter box in the car!)
• road flares
• jumper cables
• first aid kit
• snacks & gum
• lotion (I can’t stand having dry hands)
• baby wipes (great as napkins & for cleaning up any kind of spill)
• extra wiper fluid
• air compressor
• tire pressure gage

We keep a lot of this organized in a little tote in the trunk to make it easy to pack around when going from place to place!

Car maintenance

If you’re going to be bouncing from place to place around the country, making sure you’re prepared for car issues/repairs is important.

Tip 1: Have good insurance – maybe upgrade to a higher coverage plan – and definitely have AAA or an equivalent roadside assistance plan!

Tip 2: Have a hefty budget saved for car repairs, just in case*

Tip 3: Plan to have regular oil changes every few months! If you’re not renewing contracts like us, chances are you’ll need to have one done every new place you go. The miles rack up real quick!

*I stress this partly because some travel nursing contracts have clauses where if you cancel your contract for any reason (or fail to fulfill it, ie. can’t show up to work because of car issues) you are charged a large sum of money…sometimes to the tune of $5,000. Hopefully the hospital would choose to be understanding under those circumstances, but based on the deficiencies of most travel nursing contracts they probably have the option not to be. More on that to come later as well!

Storage

Like I said in my Travel Nursing Essentials blog post, one of the most difficult parts of travel nursing is packing your life into a car. This is especially true if you’re also packing your spouse and their life, plus your two cats, into your (compact) car.

Obviously I’m not recommending going out and buying a new car just so you can more easily manage travel nursing…at least I’m not recommending that to most. If you have that kind of financial freedom, it might not be a bad idea. Or, if you’re looking to buy a new car already – great! – look at bigger cars rather than a small sedan. If you’re like us and that’s not the best financial decision, you can totally make do with a small car with a little extra effort!

My family bought us our cargo box from their neighbours which was amazing, so all we had to buy was the actual roof rack. Turns out everything having to do with roof racks/cargo boxes is crazy expensive, but we honestly wouldn’t be able to do travel nursing without it. It’s an investment, but so worth it and something that you can use for many things down the line too. This is the closest to ours that Thule sells now: Thule Sidekick.

Planning ahead

This is a super complicated one, so to start I’m just going to share our most recent experience. Our car is first in Dan’s name so our registration/inspection month is February. New Hampshire requires yearly vehicle registration and inspection, unlike many other states. We recently learned that (in NH) you can have your car registered and inspected up to three months prior to your birthday month. Thankfully, we were able to get it done before we left on our road trip. We’ll be in Arizona December-mid March so otherwise we would have returned to New Hampshire with an expired registration and inspection.

Not all states operate like this however, so it’s important to know the laws of your state of (primary) residence as well as the laws of the state you are going to for travel nursing. Some states require that you register your car there if you’re going to be working in the state or living there for more than 150 days, among many other examples of time frames. We ran into this issue in South Carolina, but thankfully we were within their specific 150 days provision so it didn’t apply to us. I’m working on another blog post about this set to come out soon, so hang tight! It’s a doozy and I’m still researching.