We decided to plan a bit more than some other people might, since we have a relatively short time to see a lot of stuff- 6 weeks goes very quickly when you are making 40 stops! Personally, I would love to just take off 8 weeks and figure it out as we go and roll with the flow.. Maybe next time! ;)
We started our planning with a big old template in Excel. Ours has a lot of columns, but I hid most of them during the early planning, since things shifted so much, and the rows kept moving, so it was easiest to just have to worry about a few columns.
Important first-stage planning columns:
- Day (numbered days)
- Date (could also include days of the week)
- From Location (starting driving point)
- To Location (ending driving point)
- when we visit more than one location per day, I simply made each location a new row and maintained the day number and date for the 2nd row.
- Trip Time (in hours- know how realistically how long it will take)
These were hidden at first, but I did periodically un-hide and add information if I came across it during my research:
- Miles (not as important I guess, but I liked having this column. Since I was looking up the time, miles were also given. So I made note of it.)
- Wait to enter these two until you are fairly confident in your locations, for us, they were kind of time consuming to find.
- Budget columns- we used 3
- Gas budget- Given when finding miles/time from mapquest.
- Food budget- at this point- still complete guesses... haha
- Lodging budget- make sure to include hotels, hostels, campground fees/permits
- Lodging Plans- to make note of possible campgrounds/hotels/family to stay with
- Dining Plans- if you are into food like us, we have been researching what and where we want to make sure we don't miss, food-wise
- Activities- at first, I just researched and noted any and all that we may be interested in- it never hurts to have options
- Relevant links- hotels/campgrounds/activity passes/maps of national parks, etc..
So. Excel. Super helpful, but obviously not designed for planning road trips. Which is when I turned to a few different websites that include maps, room for making notes, free and cheap campsites, and so on. These are the ones I automatically open in a browser when I sit down to do any road trip planning:
- myscenicdrives.com- I know I've posted our map from here before. What I cut out of that screenshot was the important side column that included all of the locations pinpointed on the map, and all scenic drives and attractions that we had pinned on the map, as well as directions, time, and mileage. I tried to use mapquest to make an account and get directions and mileage for the entire trip, but failed miserably, so myscenicdrives really took over from there.
- tripit.com- This is a website/app combo that we just recently got into. Once we got our plans pretty solidified, I could transfer a lot of the information from the excel spreadsheet onto this site. It is fairly useful for a road trip, but has much more to offer- it searches your e-mail for any kind of hotel/flight/activity confirmations and imports them and allows you to differentiate between business and personal trips. Basically, it does a lot more than what we need, but it's pretty cool, because we can access our plans easily from either of our phones, and share with anyone interested.
- freecampsites.net- This site is really great, especially for low-budget, camping-heavy road trips. It does take some time and research, but it gives lots of user-reported free and cheap camping options throughout the US. It helped us choose our end points for many days, based on where the nearest cheap or free campgrounds nearby are. Just make sure you take a look to see if there are comments available- it is a 'network' not a company, so all entries are from users, and some don't exist or are different from the initial description.. The comments usually will mention these things and let you know how the campsites were.
We do have links available for our trip on both of these websites if you want to see them (just let Allison know!), but since anyone can see this and there are creepy people in this world, I am not going to post our every move and sleeping location on this blog for the world to see. :)
I also have found many resources on Pinterest, including packing lists, good road trip food to pack, and ways to save money, and so on.
We will have to update after the trip, and hopefully share more helpful hints and see how well all of these resources worked.. I guess at this point, it's all still theory as to what will actually be helpful once we leave home. :)
-Allie
