Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips and Personal Productivity Tools

Planning to take a road trip? The road trip can be one of the greatest experiences of your life, but it’s not always an easy one. I’ve done two cross-country treks and am currently planning a third for this summer. Here are some of the things I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way).

1) Take a GPS Navigation System

First and most importantly: take a GPS unit with you. On my first road trip in 2006, I thought it would be a mildly useful device. Boy was I wrong. I came to trust the GPS with my life (quite literally) and will never travel without one again.

Having a GPS to guide you to your destination eliminates most of the stress of the journey -— no more arguing over maps and wondering where in the 4,000,000 square miles of America you are. An unexpected benefit of a GPS is that it allows you to see more. A GPS will estimate precisely how long it takes to travel between locations. With this information you can make informed decisions on how much you can see in a day. There were a number of times that I could calculate exactly how long I could spend at one site before I had to leave to see another before that one closed.

Most GPS systems will also tell you where hotels are along the route, so there is no wondering where the next rest stop will be. The car I drove (a Toyota Prius) came with GPS built in, but portable versions like tomtom can be bought to use in any car.

2) Avoid Horrible Hotels With TripAdvisor.com

Compared to most places I’ve traveled around the world, the hotels in the United States are pretty comfortable. However, that doesn’t protect you from the occasional horror hotel. If you can, take a quick look for your next hotel on TripAdvisor.com before you book the night. A few moments’ research may end up saving you from something terrible like this bed-bug infested hotel.

3) Bring a Good Guide Book

Even though a GPS can get you were you want to go, you should still bring a guide book. I recommend: Road Trip USA. Road Trip USA is perfect: the author lays out eleven, non-highway, paths across America. The book provides just enough information about interesting stops to be useful but not so much as to overwhelm. More importantly, the paths the book gives provide some structure to the journey. Even if your road trip is free-form, it’s helpful to have an outline to follow when you’re too tired to plan.

4) Buy a National Park Pass

The natural beauty of America is unparalleled, so you’ll want to take advantage of her national parks. Entrance to the National Parks individually varies from about $15 to $25. However, you can buy a National Park State Pass for $80 which grants you entrance to all the parks for the year. Given the number of parks and the services they provide, it’s a bargan. More information can be found at the National Park Service website.

5) Bring Equipment for Minor Emergencies

Luckily I never had to use them, but I carried emergency items just in case. This included road flares, a first aid kit, pocket knife and a large flashlight. Also, I carried a small tool Velcroed under the steering wheel to help get out of the car in an accident. It had a hammer for smashing the window and a special blade for cutting the seat belt. Lastly, while hiking in the Southwest, I kept on me a snakebite kit.

6) Keep Food and Water in the Car

Even though the majority of America’s highways are well-covered by fast-food joints and local diners, there may be times when you find yourself, unexpectedly, on a country road without access to anything. Always keep a couple gallons of water in the car along with basic, non-perishable food, such as health bars. I’ve gotten stuck in isolated areas and relied on these supplies. The water is especially important if you are traveling through the Mojave Desert, where you can easily drink a gallon of water an hour in the hot, dry weather.

7) Stay Wired

Most of the low-end hotels in the United States provide free Internet access and a good number of them don’t bother to password protect it. When I needed to connect to the ‘net, it never failed to just pull into the parking lot of a Motel 6 and flip open my laptop. If you need a more reliable connection, you’ll probably want to shell out for Starbuck’s monthly access plan.

8) Never Let the Gas Tank Get Half Empty

I’m overly paranoid about this, but I kept the car’s tank above half at all times, partly because I worried about being caught out on a long stretch of road without gas stations (I’m looking at you, Utah) and partly because of the next tip:

9) Take Breaks Before You Need To

I had a rule that I got out of the car every hundred miles even if I didn’t feel the need to, and even if it just meant pulling off the side of the road to stretch my legs for a moment or top up the gas. It’s too easy to get road hypnotized without noticing. Break the day into small segments and you’ll enjoy it more (and be a safer driver).

10) Take Time Off From Your Road Trip

If you find a relaxing place during your travels, take a mini-vacation from your road trip. Constantly moving, making decisions and being in new places is more taxing on the brain than you may realize. It’s good to take a bit of downtime to absorb what you are experiencing. This is one piece of advice that I didn’t follow on my first trip, and regrettably I didn’t take advantage of one of America’s most beautiful parks, Yellowstone, because I was more exhausted than I knew.

11) Become a AAA Member

Triple A membership is cheap (about $50), and if you have car problems, you don’t have to worry. I didn’t need them on my trip but I have in the past and they’ve always been reliable. I had a beat-up old car in College that I had to call AAA for help with several times, and they were always fast and helpful. More information can be found at their site.

12) Bring Audiobooks

There are only so many times you can listen to that road trip playlist before you start to go crazy — especially if you are spending a month or more on the road.

I highly recommend bringing audiobooks to help keep your mind active while driving. It also adds depth to the trip to learn about the places you’re traveling through. Three I can recommend are: Under a Banner of Heaven, about the Mormons in Utah if you’re traveling across the West, A Crack at the Edge of the World: The California Earthquake of 1906 if your planning a California road trip and Confederates in the Attic if you’re going through the South.

A free alternative to audiobooks are podcasts, though this will require you to bring your laptop to fill up your iPod. I recommend: This American Life, Radio Lab, In Our Time, On Point, On The Media, The Seminars about Long-Term Thinking, and The Dave Ramsey Show.

13) Bring Your Passport.

You never know where you may end up going. While it used to be true that you only needed a driver’s license to enter Canada and Mexico that is no longer the case.

14) Document Your Progress

I kept a daily log of the places I had seen and how far I had traveled. This was useful to keep track of where I had been and to later reconstruct the entire journey. (Google Earth is great for this) Also, if you become a AAA member, they will give you free maps of every State to help you trace your path.

If you want to get really hardcore about tracking where you’ve been, you can bring along a GPS logger. I recommend the AMOD GPS which after field-testing in Europe I’ll be bringing on my next trip this summer.

Though GPS is great for planning the details of a day’s journey, there is nothing like laying out a bunch of maps across a motel bed to get a birds-eye view of where you’ve been and where you’re going.

15) Take a High-Quality Camera

A cross-country road trip is an event you are going to want to photograph, and a disposable camera just won’t cut it. Bring a good digital camera with a high zoom. My camera for my first road trip was a Cannon S3. It has some issues with noise indoors, but for outdoor shots it’s a great camera. Also, the 12x zoom is priceless for capturing far away sights. For most people the S3 is more than enough camera — it allowed me to take some of my favorite shot. If you want to take it up a notch, I recommend the Canon 450D, the camera I’ll be bringing on my next trip.

16) Travel Alone and Travel with a Friend.

This depends on your personality, but I recommend doing at least some of the trip on your own. There is a unique feeling of introspection you can get while driving across open road by yourself. However, it’s nice to include a friend to carry some of the burden of driving and planning — I did, and ended up getting a girlfriend-turned-wife out of the experience.

Best of luck with your own trip and if you have any more suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

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Header photograph by Wellington Grey