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Another Summer, Another Epic road trip in the books.
After a great vacation last year, we decided we could do another 10 day, drive across the country cramming in a as much as we could. Spend all day doing stuff, then load into the truck and drive another 4-6 hours... why not!!! I think I spent the entire vacation on almost no sleep and all coffee, but I will get to that later.
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Prep Work - Plan for months, vacation for days.
Vacations like this do not just happen, at least not for our family. In no way have I yet adopted to the travel schedule of @roadtrip.prepper. We are not free to roam and explore at our leisure, at least not yet. Given that fact that we both are still working, and the kids are still in school it makes it a bit harder. Only way to change that is if I can go full nomad remote with my job, and we home school the kids. I think 75% of the families we met were home schooling and taking the nomad approach. I am sure there are issues, but it always seems like a way better life when we are on vacation.
The Planning - Hotels - Drive and activities
When we go on vacation I plan it all. Mostly because I have traveled enough for work to know what it is like to get to a location, only to find out there are no hotels left - even when you are supposed to have one. Sometimes you end up driving for a good 30m to an hour even in a big city. Where we are going, there are not that many options and we were afraid of not being able to find a room. While I might be willing to sleep in the truck solo, we all need showers and some sort bed for the night.
- 10 nights, 8 hotels
We decided that if we're going to be going on vacation that we should try to cram in as much as possible. This means that we spend almost every single night in a different hotel room. Out of 10 nights I have booked eight different hotels which means we are only going to stay in a hotel for more than one night twice. That adds a lot of complexity to the travel arrangements, risk and making sure you never miss a check in, remove a lot of flexibility from being able to add on new activities that you think you want to do that you didn't know about until you got there, but it does give you a peace of mind that you should have a nice clean room to crash in and that you won't have to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no place to go or someplace that you feel unsafe.
Was pretty lucky that I managed to snag five out of the 10 nights by using reward points, or reward nights from holding the hotel chains credit cards. This is a pretty big savings for us, although the reward nights are really more like a prepaid night since the cards have an annual fee, but the annual fee is usually about half or less than the rate I would have paid. So I still considered a good deal and continue to hold the cards since we do take vacations.
But to plan the hotels each night means we need to play our activities each day and make sure we can get there, get done, and get out. This means we will likely keep our vacation rules the same once again
Be up for the sunrise, and get out somewhere to watch it.
Be our for sunset, and be somewhere to watch it.
Vacations are not for relaxing, sleep and leisure.. vacations are supposed to be pure chaos and grinding as much into a few days as possible. Days and drives should be long, and hikes longer. If you are having fun you are doing it wrong. You want remember the easy vacations, only the ones where you suffer and can tell stories. ( ok I might have a problem and I am only half kidding)
Now my kids do not agree, and have told me when they get older they are going to go to a hotel and just sleep in and lay by the pool. That is perfectly fine with they are paying, I will even go along if they want to pay, But on my dime, we cram in as much as possible.
- Attractions
We've noticed in the past couple vacations we've taken that we need to book some attractions much earlier than we normally like in the past because things were sold out, and unavailable if you didn't book them early. This is especially true with some State parks, entry passes for National parks, timed entry, and some other of the more fun activities that are more limited in their nature. We did book The timed entry in for a couple of national parks, and one activity that we wanted to do and wanted to make sure that wasn't sold out when we got there.
Food Prep - This makes a world of difference
- Snacks
We do a ton of prep work when it comes to our food. We only usually eat out one meal a day, that's usually dinner and the rest is eaten out of the truck or out of the backpack. This means that we spent an entire Sunday repackaging food and packing it into one of those giant black and yellow cargo carriers 12x26x18 that goes in the back of the truck. This means we buy all the granola bars, Rice krispie treats, nutty bars, cereal snacks chips trail mix pretzels etc and rebag them all. We don't just pack boxes, we unpackage them all put them in the ziplock bags, and then the stuff that needs to be we break it down into single serving size so we can grab single servings of what we want and put them into our bag or on our seats for the next section of the drive. This really helps us be able to have the food we like while on the road, and have a little ability to make sure we don't make a huge mess. Things like dried fruit and applesauce packets and a being a huge hit when the vast majority of our food is cereal or granola bars.
One of the things we started packing this year was peanut butter packets and dried pineapple. Both of those were gone pretty early in the trip.
- Drinks
Impact mostly water, we started off with at least two cases of water, and a few in the cooler to keep cold. Given the length of our trip it was hard to bring refillable bottles since we would need to wash them to make sure we weren't growing anything funky in the 110° heat. We did bring a little bit of soda and most importantly we brought.
- Coffee
Coffee coffee and more coffee. About cold brew coffee from the grocery store filled up soda bottles 3/4 of the way full and froze them. This was a good chunk of the ice that I put in the cooler to start the trip, and is it slowly started to melt I made sure to drink it. Having cold brew coffee Frozen also made sure I didn't drink my coffee too quickly so I didn't have to stop very often
Packing Comfort Items
- Laundry bags, and soap
This was a new must for us this trip, given that we're going in the heat for so long is no longer feasible to keep stinky clothes in the back of the truck for a week and not have them be so stinky and ruined that they have to be tossed. Having laundry bags that can be washed to carry your laundry back and forth it's a huge plus, and when you bring your own soap and dryer sheets you don't have to pay two plus dollars at the hotel on top of the crazy amount you're already paying for the washing machine.
- paper plates, plastic silverware and napkins/paper towels, TP
We did this to help us eat or split up larger food items that we bought or brought. Having a plate or some silverware or knife ended up being really Indian more than one occasion. Just having them in the truck made the life easier and it took up almost no room
- to paper,
Biggest hit of the trip for my kids was the fact that we actually brought her own toilet paper. My kids really hate using that hotel thin tissue paper that's basically like a mild sandpaper, especially early in a trip where they're sitting in the truck for so many hours. It's such a simple thing that I never thought to bring before, but I'm pretty sure I'll never travel again without bringing a couple rolls along.
- Clean towel & soap
It feels great to be able to actually wash your hands with soap and some water from a water bottle. You can have as much hand sanitizer as you want but when they're dirty sweaty and grimy you're not really getting them clean and they don't feel fresh. It's nice to be able to wash your hands for real if you need to or to wash out a scrape or a wound if you manage to cut yourself. Just having a hand towel and some soap and water was really nice and a couple of times where he wanted to wash up a little bit before I drive.
- Clothes
We also did close a little bit different this time. We actually packed most of our clothes and sets inside a giant Ziploc bags. And threw them all into tote this allowed us to not have to take in all of our luggage every night to the hotel since we were changing hotels every day. We would have two bags that went in to the hotel each night. One would be the bag full of electronics, any other would be the clothes and bathroom kits for everyone. This would have one clean set of clothes if needed swimsuits, and bathroom kits. This allowed us to check in and check out much easier especially it started the trip. It did take a lot of extra prep work and some extra packing, but it made life much easier when you're trying to check into the hotels and not spend an extra 30 to 40 minutes unloading the truck in the evening and before we started a day.
Drive to Altoona IA
Miles 271
4 Hr
I will admit this drive was not initially on the trip. The first day we plan to drive 14 hours, but as we got closer I actually got scared that that was too much. I was sure I could actually drive 14 hours in a day especially if he started at three or four in the morning while it would be a long and sucky day, we would get there. But that assumption was that we would have no vehicle issues, no flat tires, and no traffic. I started to get a little worried since we had no room in our schedule for delay and if we missed the first night the whole trip was going to be awful to catch back up. We decided to knock off 4 hours to first night so that we would get to the second destination a little bit earlier and maybe actually have a chance to explore.
I got off of work at 4:00 loaded up the truck at 5:00 and we started on the road. We drove 4 hours find some of the easiest driving you can do, was either i-90 West or I-35 south, both of those roads are plenty-wide plenty of lanes and we're easy enough just to set the cruise and start eating up the miles. We hit up a Culver's for made the kids super excited went to the hotel and crashed.
Not much of an exciting start to the trip, but it was nice to get on the road after all the prep work we had done.
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Total Drive Time To date
271 Miles
4 Hours
Vacation Stats
Pre Drive Friday Night
**Day 1 -Drive to Altoona **
271 Miles
4 Hrs
Vacation Running Stats
Total Miles - 271
Total Time Driving - 4
Summary
It was a crazy week prior to leaving. So much work to get it all ready and then load up the truck. Getting on road was a relief. I am really looking forward the next few days when we start to get to the fun stuff and not just driving down the road. The official day one post should be a lot more exciting than this one.