It’s summertime, which means a lot of you will be loading up the car and hitting the highway for vacation.
I love road tripping. I prefer it over flying because flying is for the birds. When you’re on a road trip, you’re in control. You’re not getting herded through a terminal like cattle, packed into a metal tube, and told you can’t use the bathroom because the seatbelt sign is on. You can be leisurely. You can watch the scenery change from plains to mountains to desert. You can pull over to see some Cadillacs stuck in the ground.
But a great road trip doesn’t just happen. Over years of driving my own family across the wide expanses of the United States, I’ve figured out a few things that separate a smooth haul from a miserable one. I also solicited some tips from a friend who’s done likewise.
To make your long drives this summer more enjoyable, here are 30 rules of the road to follow:
1. Do a pre-drive check the week before. Check the tire pressure, oil, coolant, and washer fluid and make sure they’re all good. You want to avoid those breakdowns and tire blowouts where you’re left stranded on the shoulder of I-40 between Amarillo and Tucumcari.
2. Start with a clean cabin. Declutter your vehicle, vacuum its interior, and wipe the dash. Sure, after 500 miles, the inside of your car will look like a tornado touched down inside a Love’s Country Store, but there’s something about starting a trip in a clean environment that makes it feel a bit more pleasant.
3. Pack a real paper map. Even in the cell-tower-dotted landscape of the modern age, you’ll still encounter dead zones along your drive. GPS is great right up until you’re crossing one in the desolate West. A Rand McNally Road Atlas never drops to one bar. Also, looking at it is a great way for your kids to pass the time instead of staring at a screen.
4. Stock an emergency kit. We’ve got a whole article on what every man should keep in his car, and a road trip is exactly the scenario that list was written for. Stock jumper cables, a flashlight, basic hand tools, flares, and a solid first-aid kit at the least.
5. Download what you need for entertainment and navigation, and charge devices completely the night before. From podcast episodes to playlists to directions, download everything you want to have access to, even when your phone hits SOS, before you depart. Make sure the kids have downloaded episodes of Bluey or Gilmore Girls, and that everyone’s devices are fully charged the night before.
6. Prep for quality conversation. A road trip is a great time to get in some quality conversation (QC). But QC doesn’t just happen. You have to prep for it. For the adults and older kids, send them an article or podcast to listen to before the trip so you can spend some time discussing it while on the road.
7. Bring more wet wipes than you think you need. The gas pump handle is filthy, hands will end up coated in Cheeto dust, and the public restroom soap dispenser will be empty exactly when you need it. There’s no such thing as too many wipes.
8. Take it nice and easy. One of the advantages of driving over flying is that there’s no pressure to leave at an exact time. There’s no worry about missing a flight. So take it easy. Sure, have a general time you’d like to leave and arrive by, but there’s no need to get stressed trying to stick to a strict agenda and lapse into little irrational bouts of Dad anger.
9. Drive while the little ones sleep. If you’ve got infants or toddlers, the dawn patrol and the late-night push are your best friends. A mile covered while a toddler is unconscious in his car seat is worth roughly three covered while he’s awake and restless.
10. Everyone gets a turn being the DJ. Either rotate through passengers’ respective playlists of choice, or take turns picking each song.
11. Gas up at a quarter tank. Around town you can ride the needle down to E and play chicken with the fuel light. When you’re out in the middle of nowhere and the next gas station might be 50 miles away, play it safe, and make a quarter tank of gas the minimum you’ll get to.
12. Stick to the mega travel centers for pit stops. When the family needs to use the bathroom and restock on snacks, look for the towering signs of a national chain like Love’s, Pilot, Flying J, or — if you’re blessed enough to be in their territory — a Buc-ee’s. You are guaranteed a high baseline of restroom cleanliness, an elite, wall-to-wall snack selection, and brightly lit spaces. Leave the sketchy, dimly-lit, one-pump stations as pit stops of last resort.
13. Clean the windshield at every fill-up. A smudge of bug guts might not bother you in town, but staring through a kaleidoscope of dead gnats while driving into the setting sun is a recipe for annoyance and impaired vision. Grab the squeegee while the pump is running; it takes 60 seconds and drastically improves visibility.
14. Everyone pees when you stop. Whenever you take pit stops, everyone must go to the bathroom. No exceptions. No “I’m good.” Because the kid who was “good” will announce 30 minutes later that he was, in fact, right on the cusp of being not good and now needs to go.
15. Everyone moves when you stop, too. Your bladder isn’t the only thing that needs attention when you pull off — so do your hips. Eight hours folded into a driver’s seat will turn your lower back into a rusted hinge. Walk a lap around the gas station, do a few toe-touches or squats by the pump — get the blood flowing again.
16. Run a dedicated trash bag. One designated bag for trash keeps the footwells from turning into a landfill by the afternoon. Empty it at every single gas stop. Replace with a new bag.
17. Pad the timeline. If the GPS says eight hours, plan for ten and a half. Kids move slow, bathroom stops run long, and the surest way to ruin the drive is to chain yourself to an arrival time you were never going to make.
18. Treat screens as a tool, not a crutch. While it’s tempting to just let your kids zombify in front of their screens the entire trip, resist the urge. All kids need to experience the boredom of a road trip and the pleasures that can come with watching the landscape move past them. Put them on a rotation, like two hours off screens for every one hour on.
19. Have an arsenal of games ready. Road trip bingo, 20 Questions, Shotgun, the alphabet game, magnetic checkers. Cycle through them throughout the trip.
20. Kids must play Mad Libs. At least once. It’s a kid road trip rite of passage.
21. The left lane is for passing. Treat this as an unbreakable law of the universe, obey it religiously, and teach it to your kids by example. If you’re not passing somebody, get over. The republic of the road depends on it.
22. Use cruise control. Ensures you keep a steady pace the entire trip and keeps you from drifting up to 90 without noticing, which is how you end up explaining yourself to a state trooper while your kids watch terrified from the backseat, thinking their dad is going to jail.
23. Take the dumb detour. See a brown sign for a state park, a roadside museum, or a giant fiberglass something-or-other, and you’ve got the time? Take the exit. The World’s Largest Ball of Twine may become a core memory.
24. The hotel pool is non-negotiable. If you’ve got to stop at a hotel for the night, picking one with a pool is essential — at least if you have kids. After being strapped into a seatbelt for eight hours, your kids will have the pent-up kinetic energy of a coiled spring. Throwing them into a heavily chlorinated rectangle for 45 minutes before bed is the absolute best way to ensure they actually sleep through the night.
25. Curate the snacks. Beef jerky, almonds, pretzels — elite road fuel. Anything powdered, crumbly, melty, or sticky will end in regret. Powdered donuts in particular are an interior-ruining liability, and you will be vacuuming that white dust out of the seat seams six months from now.
26. Embargo “Are we there yet?” Ban the question outright. We get there when we get there.
27. No farting. Have some decency. Passengers are locked in a confined space and can’t escape.
28. Find an audiobook for the whole cabin. Eight hours of screens will turn their brains to mush. A good audiobook the whole family can sink into — or even some vintage spooky radio shows — unites everybody and vaporizes a couple hundred miles.
29. Embrace the silence. You do not need a podcast, audiobook, or Spotify playlist pumping through the speakers for all 1,000 miles. Let the cabin fall quiet for an hour. It gives the driver a break from sensory input and often leads to the best, most organic conversations of the trip.
30. Remember the drive is the trip. If all you care about is getting there, you should’ve bought plane tickets. The arguments, the inside jokes, the gas-station weirdos, the Killers singalongs, that’s the vacation, too, and often the stuff you remember most.
