I love Road Trips! The more exotic the location, the better.

I love Road Trips! The more exotic the location, the better.

When you ask someone why they want to live in a van or RV one of the most common answers is because that person has always wanted to travel and see this beautiful country. In fact, most full-timers I talk to say that in their first year they went crazy traveling, they put in thousands of miles and went everywhere. I know I did! I had a long list of places I wanted to see and off I went without a thought or a plan. It was a great trip but it ended up with me broke and I had to get a job to keep going! Fortunately, a friend turned me onto Work-camping and I found a job that gave me the best of both worlds.
I’m afraid that’s the way it is for most people. After a lifetime of working at a job many of us aren’t really knowledgeable about how to plan and budget for a long road trip. We’ve been dreaming about it for a long time, but never done it. Some of us took some Road Trips when we were young, and they were wonderful, but now that we are older we would like to do a little more planning than when we were young and wild. Otherwise, we’ll just kind of haphazardly hit the road and go wherever the wind blows us. While there is nothing wrong with that there is another way that may work better.
To me, the open road is the true pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

To me, the open road is the true pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

What happens all too often is that we burn out on traveling and end up wasting so much time and money that we don’t get to see and do all the things we started out to do. Don’t get me wrong, there is no right way that works for everybody, but I think for most of us the best way is finding a balance between planning and spontaneity. That way you make the best use of your time and money but also leave room for seizing the moment.
Looking back on our recent Alaska trip, we did some things right, and we did some things wrong. With my experience from the Alaska trip fresh in mind, let me tell you some lessons we learned and things we would do differently so you can avoid my mistakes and still have a great time. In today’s post I’ll summarize the facts and figures of our recent Alaska trip in this table and give you some tips on planning your own trips. I’ll begin with something we did right.
Here are the basic facts and figures from our Alaska trip. I'll use these to draw lessons we learned on the trip.

Here are the basic facts and figures from our Alaska trip. I’ll use these to draw lessons we learned on the trip. There will be multiple posts on this topic.

Lesson Number One: Break the Trip up Into Stages for Planning Purposes.

As you can see from the above table, it was a jam-packed trip–almost 9000 miles in 65 days! It was so big we couldn’t really get a handle on the whole thing, so we broke it down into stages and planned them individually. We looked for logical breaks, and this was what we came up with:

  • Stage 1: We drove north to the Grand Tetons NP, stopping for six days in Zion National Park and 7 days in Grand Teton, NP. That took 22 days. We had two things we wanted to do, spend time in Zion and Grand Teton NP and we did both of them.
  • Stage 2: We left the Grand Tetons and drove through Canada to the Alaska Border. That was 8 days. Our goals for that leg were to stop at Judy’s favorite hot springs in Idaho and to take pictures at Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rocky. We did see the hot springs and enjoyed it a lot. But when we got to the Canadian Rockies we found them still snowed in so we adapted out plans and just moved on.
  • Stage 3: We were in Alaska for 30 days and drove 2100 miles there (it’s a big state!). We ran into some problems in Alaska and we didn’t get everything done I wanted done but we did the three main things of seeing my son, fly-in bear viewing, and flight-seeing Mt. McKinley.
  • Stage 4: After all that we were ready to get home so we blasted our way back through Canada and officially ended the trip in Jackson, Wyoming. On that leg we covered 2,790 miles in 6 days. I had originally planned to stop at the Canadian Rockies on the way back but we were tired of traveling by then so we skipped it. When we were planning the trip we both thought that was likely to be the case so it came as no surprise.

So when we were planning the trip we looked at the route and searched for the things that interested us along the way. We searched all the things in the Continental US, then Canada, then Alaska. We didn’t have time to get all those things done, but at least we were aware of them and then set our priorities for the time we had. In a later post I’ll give you some ideas of things you might be interested in seeing and doing on your Road Trips.

Anchorage has the largest and busiest seaplane base in the world. We went and sat in a little park and watched the planes coming and going and were rewarded by this very cool blue-sky rainbow.

Anchorage has the largest and busiest seaplane base in the world. We went and sat in a little park and watched the planes coming and going and were rewarded by this very cool blue-sky rainbow.

Lesson Number Two: Use maps, guide books and the internet to plan and find all the interesting things along your route.

You’re going to spend a lot of time and money on this trip so you want to get all you can out of it. Who knows, maybe this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip and you will never be that way again. It would be  terrible to find out you were just a few miles away from something you would have loved to see or do and you missed it because you didn’t know it was there. So spend the time leading up to the trip to do lots of research on the entire trip route. I didn’t just study Alaska, I studied the whole route along the way.

  1. Have good maps. I know, GPS has taken over the world but I much prefer a good old fashioned paper map. Too many times GPS has simply led me the wrong way so I don’t trust them. That’s especially true of back-country roads. My every experience with GPS designed for autos in the National Forests has been a disaster! Both Judy and I have one, and every so often it is a life-saver but I mostly use real maps. We never used a GPS on the whole Alaska trip. Here are the maps I recommend
  2. First, find maps specific to your state or region. In our case that was the Milepost which nobody should ever go to Alaska without.
    get it from Amazon here: Milepost 2014
    Next, I recommend either Benchmark Atlas or a Delorme Atlas and Gazeeter for each state you will spend any amount of time in. I prefer the Benchmark but I got the DeLorme for half price so I bought them instead for Alaska, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. Get it from Amazon here: Arizona DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer
    They were essential to finding campsites in the National Forests along the road. Then, I recommend a single fold out map of the entire region: this is the one I used and it was my number one tool! With it I can see multiple states and get the big-picture at a glance. I find that indispensable! You might ask “Every Atlas has a map of the whole US, why get this one?” Because it’s big enough that it not only shows you the freeways, it shows you most of the back-roads you are likely to take. Every road we took on this trip was on it! What I did to make it easier to use is I opened it up and folded it flat in such a way that I could fold and unfold it and see big regions at a glance. Here is the most important thing I did, these maps are cheap and will fall apart so I use clear, 1 inch wide package tape to cover the main seams. I still have the one I used on my first 2006 road trip and it is still perfectly usable! I keep it because I wrote all my notes and campsites on it and it becomes a visual diary. But it from Amazon here: Rand McNally Western United States Regional Map
  3. Buy guide books covering your interests. Whatever your interest, Amazon.com has a guide book covering it and wherever you’re going there is a guide book covering everything interesting in it and on the way to it. Because my favorite interest is photography I search Amazon for guides to photographing the states I visit, especially it’s National Parks . On this trip I had them for Zion, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, and the Canadian Rockies. Get it from Amazon here: Photographer’s Guide to Yellowstone & the Tetons: Here is a Guide to Off-Beat places all over the country: Road Trip America: A State-By-State Tour Guide to Offbeat Destinations Here is the Reders Digest Guide to the most Scenic drives in the country. Highly recommended: The Most Scenic Drives in America, Newly Revised and Updated: 120 Spectacular Road Trips Here is a link to the search “Road Trip America”. It has many wonderful books you will find very useful: Take this link to see many Great Road Trip books on Amazon.I also have books covering camping in Canada and Alaska, the National Wildlife Refuges and Birding locations. Whatever your interests and hobbies are, chances are there are books covering where, when and how to do it across the country. I try to get them for my Kindle first, but if they aren’t available for it I try to buy them used. Oddly, many of the books I want are only available used.
  4. The internet is a wonderful source of information on all kinds of things on a road trip. Whatever you’re interested in, and wherever you are going in the country, somebody has written about it on the net! It’s especially good for camping and boondocking locations. For that I highly recommend freecampsites.net!! http://freecampsites.net/
  5. Stop at the Visitors Centers and Ranger Stations for the states and Parks you visit. I always find valuable literature in them. Each state offers lots of literature to entice you into visiting it, I strongly encourage you to get it. They tend to be shallow and full of stuff you don’t care about, but I’ve always found some things I didn’t know and was glad I had it. Most states has a website you can order it from or can download it, usually on a .pdf.

Well, this post has gotten long enough so I am going to stop here and I will start up on more lessons and more advice on how to plan for your Road Trips in the next post.