Top Road Trip Tips

Planning a road trip is lots of fun but to have a great time it is sometimes useful to think through the dull, practical stuff. Here are our top road trip tips to ensure your trip runs smoothly……

There is often no one way fee for hire car rental if you pick up and drop off at different places in the same State. If however you want to pick up in one State and drop off in another you will almost always be charged.

Decide what you want your maximum time in the car to be on a single day and plan overnights accordingly. This may mean you end up stopping off at somewhere not on your itinerary but this can make for some interesting variation.

If you are driving outside the major conurbations in the US, you can be pretty confident of achieving the drive time indicated by your mapping or sat nav tool. This is why Americans often give road distances in hours rather than miles.

If you are going to be driving for more than a couple of hours at a stretch consider getting more than one driver named on the hire agreement.

Packing and unpacking at a different hotel room every night can get old really quickly. Decide how much of that you want to do and whether you want to factor in some longer stops.

If you normally rely on the google navigation app on your phone to get around don’t forget it won’t work if you’ve turned off the data to avoid high roaming charges! You will need to go old school with a map which you can either buy before you travel or at a gas station on arrival, or hire a sat nav from the car rental company.

Motorway (interstate) food and petrol services are often provided just off the interstate at the junction with a town. In our experience the food tends to be some variant on the large fast food chains. We have not found similar to the M&S / Waitrose type facilities that are in some British services. If you know you don’t eat fast food then a picnic is a good idea! There are frequent rest stops along the interstates with picnic benches and toilet facilities (similar to those in France) but no petrol and any eating and drinking provision will be via vending machine.