Road Trip Tips

Is there anything more beautiful than a road? A ribbon of endless potential stretching out before you, beckoning you forward towards the horizon and an unknown future?

Well actually yes, it's a road accompanied but our top road trip tips.

Road trips rule; that is a fact. You are the captain of your own ship; you are in control of your itinerary, you can make any impromptu stops and diversions are a standard. You can do what you want, when you want; it's the best way to travel.

There are plenty of ways to make your road trip awesome. Firstly you need to make sure you have the essentials.

You will need a co-pilot, Han Solo had one and for a very good reason. You will actually go mental without one and who else are you going to play ‘Punch Buggy’ with. Games are a great way to pass the time on long drives, your co-pilot will also be your opponent, you will need someone else in the car that you can rap battle against. If you are going on a mega road trip, you will be able to share the driving. It is also the co-pilots role to be chief navigator and music selector, which leads me nicely onto...

Music; you can pick up a map at any old garage, but if you leave home without some good tunage you are screwed. Your car needs to be fitted with some kind of iPod adapter allowing for stacks of tunes and minimal space usage. For our last road trip Emma and I put together an individual playlist of our Top 100 tunes. The resulting 200 tunes were then dropped into one playlist and then banged on shuffle. When a tune came up the selector would claim it by stating “mine”. Very occasionally we had
selected the same tune and would celebrate this with a hi-5. This very democratic way of selecting music means everyone in the car gets a little bit of something they love. Often you associate your favourite songs with certain points in your life and so it is also a great way to start conversation. If you are not a big music fan, download some podcasts; comedy, education, fiction, whatever, just make sure you have some aural entertainment.

The next road trip essential is not petrol as you might expect, but food. The car needs to be loaded. If you are lucky enough to have a fridge in your wagon then great; if not get a cool box, or better yet, two. Load both cool boxes with ice and use one for drinks and the other for food. Impromptu picnics are always good and a great way to save cash. Snacks will not only relieve hunger and give much needed sugary concentration boosts but they will also relieve boredom. Make sure you pack enough for
everyone in the car.

Once you have the three essentials you are ready to set off. You can drive for as long as you like, but remember a road trip is not just about getting from A to B; it’s about discovering all the space in the middle. You need to make sure you stop for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you’ll need to pee after drinking the ice box full of sugary pop. Secondly, you’ll need to stretch your legs...and eyes. Thirdly, you will actually go insane if you spend too much time behind the wheel. It is very easy to get zoned in with all the concentrating and before long you’ll be imagining you are Han Solo and Chewbacca travelling through hyper-space in the Millenium Falcon. Stop off at petrol stations, rest stops, view points and of course any freakish roadside attractions you might come across.

Having said this make sure you have a good plan, this doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. It’s important to plan to a certain degree as the last thing you want to do is to get stranded at night with nowhere to sleep or run out of petrol.

That is all our road trip tips for the time being....

Andy