Road trip hot tips

With summer being prime season for road trips, I wanted to share some of the strategies we used to make our 80-hour road trip from Alberta to Louisiana and back more comfortable:

Portable hobbies: Even though it may seem obvious to most knitters who read my blog, it doesn’t hurt to reiterate! I like to take a sock project with me whenever we travel, as it occupies very little space — one skein of yarn, mini circular needles, darning needle and double-pointed needles (DPNs) fit into a tiny drawstring bag. The semi-mindless project meant I could knit without having to stare down at my work the whole drive and risk getting carsick. When my socks were done, I cast on another pair!

Bring a powered cooler: My husband grew up going on marathon 12-hours-in-one-go road trips to Manitoba with his family, and they used an electric cooler to keep their road trip snacks fresh much longer than with a standard cooler; so we picked one up ourselves. It fit nicely in the backseat, plugged into the cigarette lighter, and also included a wall outlet for indoor use. It was like a mini fridge with handles! And when plugged in, it emits a soft hum, so it doubled as our white noise machine at night.

Road meals: Tiktok would call this “Girl Dinner,” my husband calls it “Smorgasborgas.” With the cooler at our disposal we were able to get by without going to a lot of sit-down restaurants or subsisting exclusively on fast food along our journey. When we crossed the border into Montana, we went to a grocery store and bought finger food like baby carrots, grapes, blueberries, jerky, crackers, and mini cheeses. When we got hungry, I would turn around to reach into the backseat, and I would hand my husband bits of food as he drove. It felt like we were a pair of surgeons performing an operation — scalpel, forceps, cheese, jerky.

On the way back, we procured a campsite cutlery kit and plastic lunch trays from Target. These definitely helped organize our food and opened the possibilities for more road meals, like bagels with jam.

Comforts of home: Hotel pillows almost always suck, and I really struggle to sleep without my weighted blanket. So, we thought, why not just bring those things with us from home? While it did take up a bit of space in our trunk and added to the things we carried in and out of hotels every night, it definitely helped us both sleep better.

We also brought two stainless steel camp mugs (not travel mugs, but regular mug-shaped mugs) and our own teas to have in the room. Because, again, hotel cups are generally not up to snuff, and half the time they don’t have any decaf tea on hand, which is the only tea I can drink in the evening.

Audiobooks: We were in the car for six hours every day at minimum, and being a particularly bookish couple, we like to pop on an audiobook for long drives. We finished five audiobooks on the road: The Fall of Koli by M.R. Carey, The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell, Earthside by Dennis E. Taylor, Roadkill by Dennis E. Taylor, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman; and started a sixth, Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. Our shared taste in audiobooks usually leans in favour of science fiction and its many subgenres, like horror, post-apocalypse, comedy, and aliens. The only outlier of this bunch being the non-fiction Living Danishly, which we listened to because we desperately miss being in Copenhagen.

Pace yourself: If it hadn’t been for the purpose of picking up heirlooms from my grandparents, we would have flown rather than driven the 10,000 km it took to get to Louisiana. There had also been a level of urgency as we had finite time off to make it to our destination and back, so we only spent one night in each state we visited. At times it didn’t feel much like a vacation, especially the latter half where we hit a mental wall and were just eager to go back to our normal life. Two weeks is a long time to be away.

If we were to take another road trip in the future, we would have it so that the drive was the vacation, and not a means to an end. Take a leisurely pace, stay longer in places we wish to explore further, circumvent the boring places, and be home before we’re sick of being on the road.