To get to just about anywhere outside requires transportation, and only so many cool outdoor places are within walking distance to your home. As a result, a car can come in very handy, and with spring break right around the corner, a road trip for a couple of days offers the perfect chance to explore the country or state and get a little outdoors.
There are so many variations to taking a road trip that any two road trips are never the same. The weather, the locations and the activities all vary depending on who the trip is with, how much time there is for the trip, where the starting location is, among other things.
However, there are pitfalls to every road trip and it requires planning to keep the trip as a prime memory to lock away and tell friends and family once it has been completed. Finding the balance between what makes the trip an adventure or a disaster is crucial.
The first aspect of going on a road trip is also the most crucial to whether it will be an enjoyable one: the people. For a road trip to be as much fun as it could possibly be, the people that accompany you on the trip must be nothing but the best.
A road trip crams all the participants into a single car or caravan, meaning that personal space is now a luxury of the past. Therefore, anyone that partakes in the trip has to be able to let people intrude on their personal space for a little bit and forgo the habits that they normally have on their own.
This means no more sleeping naked, no more exploding your packs all over your space and no more leaving dirty clothes on the floor. On a road trip, everyone has to become the perfect roommate because once people are crammed into a small space and are forced to be around each other for 24 plus hours straight, tensions are more easily aroused.
To avoid an eruptive situation between amigos, there are some precautions that can be made to ease the life on the road. If your friend can’t handle social interaction for more than an hour, maybe don’t invite them.
Or if their room looks like an episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive, keep them on the roof of the car so all their trash flies away and doesn’t end up in someone else’s backpack. Also, don’t pick Tom and Jerry to be your road trip partners, pick friends that will get along with the others, like Joey and Chandler.
Whoever you pick, the bond that is forged on a road trip is unique and very difficult to replicate outside of that scenario, making it a perfect way to become lifelong friends good friends or even mediocre ones.
When people are that close for long enough, you really get to know each other. The people picking is an essential part of the whole planning process, for if anything goes wrong with the rest, the right group will get past it and have a fun time regardless.
The second most important part of getting a road trip together is how you get to the destination. All that you need for a road trip is a destination, everything else can fall into place when you get to it.
For example, say San Diego is the destination, that is essentially all that you need. Sure it could be helpful to create a detailed itinerary that outlines all the places that you will be going to, but it isn’t required.
One way to travel on a road trip is to set the destination, then choose to see any attractions along the way as you drive past them. A spontaneous trip like this can be stellar or subpar, but the excitement is in the mystery of what is around the corner.
Conversely, if the entire trip is planned from A to B, then there is a higher chance that everyone is satisfied with it at the end. With a strict plan, sites are seen and attractions toured, it just loses the mystery and spontaneity that is inherent in a road trip. Of course, there is a blending of the two, which offers a little of both worlds, but in the end, there tends to only be enough time for one variation.
The final aspect of having a great road trip lies in the destination itself. Picking a boring destination to go to, like the hammer museum in Haines, Alaska, can ruin a trip especially if the people were picked poorly.
An exciting location like the Sequoia or Zion National Parks will set the road trip up for success. Any destinations along the way to the final destination are all cherries on top of the sundae and can enhance the trip or make the final destination all that more exciting if it is a very dull in-between location.
The perfect combination of destinations can lead the trip to heights that could never be recreated on a plane ride or your average in and out adventure.
Of course, you can just leave in a direction without a destination, but this can be a very volatile way to travel and can easily get people lost. Picking the perfect location for your group is very important and is essentially the whole point of a road trip, otherwise, it would be fine to stay at home and watch Netflix.
Together, these three components to going on a road trip are the essentials and will make or break the adventure. Friends are the most important while trip style and destination are important in different but irreplaceable ways.
However, when all aspects are taken into consideration, planned and executed effectively, there is no need to worry. So take a trip, go on an adventure with your closest friends all cramped into a single shared space and see something that you can’t see from your window. Take a road trip and make some memories to share for a generation.
