Our recent spring break road trip adventure was 10 days and 4,000 miles together. We had a great time and are already plotting our next trip!

I say “plotting” and not “planning” because this was a very (very, very!) loosely “planned” trip and I’m sure the next one will be too. Our family likes to call our NOT-AT-ALL-PLANNING style of planning “being flexible.” {smile} Everyone keeps asking me how in the world I planned our awesome trip…well, in my mind, I didn’t. We laid out a very basic route with a few key milestones, and just drove along and stopped wherever we wanted to–it was awesome!

Here’s how I un-planned 4,000 miles of adventure…

1. Choose a Comfortable Daily Distance

I started with the idea that 6 hours of driving a day was a comfortable amount without being in the car too long. That gave us plenty of time to stop for meals or spend half a day at an activity or museum without feeling rushed. We could also easily drive longer if we felt like it, the weather was bad, or the kiddos were sleeping.

6 hours averages out to about 360-ish miles a day, depending on how you drive.

Multiply 360 by 10 days of vacation, and I’ve got time for about 3600 miles of adventure–round trip.

Where does 1,800 miles away from home put me?

2. Choose an EndPoint Destination

I used Google Maps for just about all our navigation on our trip. So you can either start plugging in major cities and see how far away they are to start estimated your distances (this is how I started out), or…

There’s an awesome online mapping tool at FreeMapTools.com called the Radius Around a Point tool. There’s a second tool called the How Far Can I Travel tool. It will give you a good feel for what’s in your one-way driving distance. This is how we’ve already started “plotting” our next road trip. I would round down on your total mileage in Step 1 because as you fine tune along the way, it seems like every adjustment you make adds miles. {smile}

Once you see what’s in your radius, I would pick a cool end-point destination of interest to your family (ours was The Alamo in San Antonio, TX). Just remember, the fun is the journey, so this endpoint is just for planning purposes. It’s not the end of your road trip!

3. Pick One or Two other Milestones (as a family)

This is one way to include the whole family in your UnPlanning. We asked everyone to come up with a few things they would like to see or do and we agreed to try and work them in. Out of all 5 lists, we picked two that needed a little extra planning to be successful–seeing the French Quarter in New Orleans and seeing Churchill Downs in Louisville Kentucky. They ended up as our key milestones between home and San Antonio.

A few other things on our trip bucket list were:

• go camping
• stay in a hotel and go swimming in the hotel pool
• eat at a restaurant we saw on TV
• see an alligator
• go to the beach
• see Daniel Boone’s fort in KY (thanks to the new History Channel show…MWBA Frontiersmen)
• visit the American Pickers store in Nashville

 

We managed to work most of them in, but we only used those 3 spots–New Orleans, the Alamo, and Churchill Downs–to guide our route. Everything else was flexible.

4. Use Two Distinct Routes

This is part of how we packed so. much. fun. into our trip. NO BACK-TRACKING. Plan in a big circle, or loop, or in our case, an oval, between home and your cool endpoint.

5. Lay Out a Conceptual Route

I used Google Maps for this part. 

I mapped directions from our house to our first milestone location. Once you’re in the “get directions” screen, you can add up to 9 total locations to map a route or road trip. You can add them to a general location “Atlanta Georgia” or you can add them to a very specific location like “Churchill Downs, 700 Central Ave, Louisville, KY.”

Starting out, I mapped from our house to San Antonio, with a stop in New Orleans. Then I measured off chunks of that basic (and very direct) route into 350-mile pieces (see #1 up there to determine your daily distance). That gave me an idea for a daily endpoint as well. Day 1, we wanted to be somewhere around Atlanta. Day 2, we wanted to be somewhere around Mobile, etc. This gave us an outline to go by. Then if we wanted to drive a little longer one day, or have a little more time in the city for shopping, or whatever, we could gauge the impact of the stop on the whole trip.

Same thing going home. From San Antonio to Home, with a stop in Louisville. Then I started mapping some cool things in between–like Fort Boonesborough, KY and The Silos at Magnolia in Waco. We basically had a whole list of cool things along the way and we decided if we wanted to do any of them (or not) as we went along.

6.  Make a Radius Around the Daily EndPoint

Once you have the basic route, you can start looking for places and things.

Since we knew we wanted to go camping, one thing I did at every daily endpoint was to search “state parks near >>>” and fill in Atlanta or Mobile, or wherever our endpoint was. We created a list of possible campsites at each location so we had a general idea of where we’d be sleeping each night and just filled in all our other activities with stuff we saw advertised along the way. You could also search for hotels, children’s museums, zoos or aquariums, antique stores, movie theaters, or whatever kind of activities your family enjoys.

We did nail down our campsites with reservations the week before we left, but any days we didn’t have a reservation, we just planned to find a hotel wherever we decided to stop. 

7. Simple Meal Plan

We pre-purchased all snacks and drinks at the grocery store, so no gas station treats to blow our budget! (Yep, even coffee and energy drinks!) I also had tortillas and pb&j combo spread as a food backup plan. We shopped at a local grocery store along the way for camping dinners and breakfasts. This made me a little nervous at first but worked out well. Everyone could be part of the decisions and we could be flexible depending on what we’d already eaten that day. Who wants to end up having hamburgers for 2 or 3 meals in a row?

We had breakfast at our hotel when we weren’t camping. We budgeted for one “special” meal a day if we found a restaurant we wanted to try, and kept everything else healthy, but very basic.

There’s this great app called TV Food Maps that we enjoyed using as we went along, since we’re big Food Network fans.

8. Just Be Willing to Stop!

This was the main thing about our trip. Since we only had a direction to go every day, we could just stop wherever we wanted to.

If we saw a road sign that looked interesting or remembered a landmark the kids might enjoy, we Googled it and made a detour. We took the scenic route to see rice farms, we drove through little college campuses and historic districts, we looped back 15 miles to go to an antique store…and sometimes that ended up messy and unexpected in a good way! Google said Galveston was only 40 miles off our route–it forgot to mention that included a ferry ride! {grin} Two and a half hours later…BAM!

Did you know Loretta Lynn has a dude ranch in TN outside of Nashville with a bunch of frontier museums and a replica of her Butcher Holler cabin? It was a beautiful place to get out of the car and let the kids run for a couple hours (plus really down-home cooking for lunch!).

All because we followed the random road signs!

I did put a lot of planning into having games and snacks together before we left. And Mr. Fix-It put a lot of time into making sure our camping equipment and the truck were in good shape. But once we hit the road, we were free birds! {smile}

Do you enjoy random road trips? Are you a detailed planner, or a flexible, fly-by-night-adventurer? We’re already un-planning our next one!