Road Trip

How do I make a road trip stressless? (or at least try to lol)

Dylan and I are moving cross country from CA to SC in four days. How?

LOTS of planning, budgeting, and preparation.

Step one: See how far you're traveling and plan to drive no more than 10 hours/day to be safe!
ex. 2,500 miles? 625 miles (2,500 divided by 4) takes about 9 hours...so we said 4 days of travel.

Step two: Plan your route and incorporate any preferable stops. We will be stopping 3 times.
-The first day we want to visit my eldest brother in AZ so we figured that would be a shorter day of driving (8 hours). We will stop for the night there.

-On the second day we need to compensate so we will drive all the way to OK from AZ (10 hours). We plan on eating lunch in TX since will be passing through. Stopping for the night again.

-The third day we want to take a bit of a detour to visit Nashville since it isn't too far our of the way. We will get up a little earlier and most likely trade off so Dylan can rest and we can have fun when we get there since its still a farther drive (10 hours). We plan to have dinner and enjoy the night so we will definitely stop here.

-On our last day we will go from TN to SC..woohoo!! This will be our shortest drive of about 7 hours, we will most likely stay on base this day then go to our new home the following`( we are still currently house hunting!!).

Step two: Plan a Pet friendly trip! We have our baby girl Maggie with us on this move, of course, and need to make sure everything we do accommodates her. I love the site Go Pet Friendly. It has food, resorts, hotels, etc...that are all (you guessed it) pet friendly!! This is also how I determined where we would stop. I simply chose a hotel from our previous destination and it shows me the time it would take. Easy right?

Step three: Preplan your hotels!! Don't just show up. I have several other listed incase of an emergency, but I reserved our hotels with free cancellation up to the day of reservation. This saves money and makes things less stressful. I encourage you to use a third party booking site for preferable rates. I personally use Booking.com, which I love because I can compare so many choices and I've just had a great experience with them. I love the free cancellation options and how great their customer service is. I believe I've booked with them about a dozen times thus far.

Step four: You know how far your going right? But how the heck do you figure out how much your gas will cost? Obviously if your math savy you'll easily figure out an equation....but me..I'm lazy. Thank goodness for trip calculators. This website will help you find out how much it'll cost with the make, model, and year of your car. PLUS you can add all the stops you plan to take to make your results more accurate. I. LOVE. IT.

Step five: BUDGET. I strongly recommend budgeting your trips. I always ROUND UP. You booked your hotels, you know how much gas you will use, and on average you should budget $50/person per day for food (googled a good average).
.......Now if you think like me you'll find hotels that have breakfast included (cheaper and I love hotel waffles). I was able to average $75/day for both myself and dylan with this.
...Again if you're thinking like me.....you'll already plan ahead and do a dollar tree snack haul...and pack lunches in case you get stranded or something lol.

Yes, I know I overthink (trust me), but I truly live by "better to be safe, than sorry".

Especially since this is a 2,500 mile trip...always expect something to go wrong so that if it does you'll be okay (this makes it less stressful if it happens)! With adding an extra tank of gas, extra night at a hotel (incase something happens), rounding up on food (you never know how much something will cost), AND adding a couple hundred for souvenirs this trip will cost us about $1k. Frankly, thats pretty dang good for a cross country road trip. I'm sure you could do it for much less, but we want to be enjoy this adventure since it's a much needed action after 10 months apart. Also, you should always have a few hundred extra in case of an emergencies!!

Step five: pack. I personally will pack about 5 outfits (always pack an extra) and all of them will be fashion friendly, versatile, and comfortable since these are 9 hour/avg drives. I even found a hotel with a washer in the room to help us keep everything clean incase we need to reuse them!! I'll pack Dylan's bag similarly since I know I'll want to take pictures for y'all.

I hope this is useful for everyone because geez...I know I rely on blogs for literally...everything lol.

Xo,
Lisa Monqiue
email: lisamoniquehealthandfitness@gmail.com
instagram/twitter: lisa__monique

P.S. I also supplied the links I recommended within the steps.