An ideal road trip is 8 days long. Choose a destination that is about 7 hours from home, schedule breaks every two hours if you have any children in car seats, and plan the trip at least thirty days in advance to reduce travel stress.
Road trips are a great idea this summer and eight days has been shown to be the ideal length of a vacation.
What does that mean for your road trip?
Plan to travel around five to eight hours or 300-500 miles from home. You can use withinhours.com to find all the interesting places within that radius. This is a really cool site where you can find cities within your drive time!
This will allow you to stop frequently on your trip, and give you plenty of days in your destination city.
If you want to plan a trip with several stops, try to spend at least 3 days in each location, consider planning to hit some exciting restaurants or cool overnight accommodations.
Make every stop magical.
If you have a week of vacation, try splitting it up and leaving on a Sunday or Tuesday, historically the safest days to travel, and lower traffic days.
You can avoid wasting time in traffic by checking this site to find the times to travel to avoid traffic. This is a great review of some good traffic apps, you may also want to have a map juuussst in case.
If you will be driving more than 6 hours, consider stopping and spending the night along the way.
When I was a child we drove 600 miles evey year twice a year along the East Coast. We were going to visit family, but we NEVER ONCE stopped in any of the major cities we passed through.
This may add cost and cause you to lose time in your destination, but it is worth it to spend a few hours recharging. Find an interesting place to stay by using AirBnB or HipCamp, and it just might be everyone’s favorite part of the trip.
Pro Tip: Save the splurgy hotel for the trip home when everyone is feeling really crusty. That beautiful hotel room will give everyone a second wind.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children in car seats are unbuckled and taken out of the car every two hours. You may choose to stop more frequently for very young children under one. This is intended to keep young children from sliding down and cutting off their air flow, so make sure you are checking your child’s breathing frequently. This is more important the younger your child.
If you want more ideas to reduce travel stress I wrote a bunch about it here. I have a great list of toys to entertain the toddlers here.
Remember, the trip is a big part of the vacation, embrace the smelly dirty car!
