How to Plan a Route in the United States

Planning a route for a complicated trip across the country can be daunting, but there are simple steps that you can take to make it much easier. Staying focused in your planning will help you to gain the maximum benefit from your journey rather than potentially wasting time with useless activities, getting lost or underestimating your travel times and being late everywhere. This step-by-step guide will help you plan your route from start to finish with as little trouble as possible.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Calculate Your Available Trip Time

Step 1

Figure out your destination. If you are traveling in a straight line from one place to another or traveling in a loop to end up back home, you can use a site such as mapquest.com or yahoo maps to get the total mileage you will be driving.

Step 2

Decide on a major route. There's more than one way to get anywhere. The major route if traveling in the United States is whether or not you will roughly travel along the north or south, east or west, or right through the middle road to your destination. For example, for a trip from California to New York do you go through the southern states and up the East Coast or up the West Coast and along the northern states or cut straight through the middle?

Step 3

Locate the best activities for outdoor adventures along the major route you have chosen. Using this site and various other guides such as Fodor's, you can find a host of activities for each and every part of the country. Some are seasonal, so call the destination(s) in advance to be sure they are open and/or that they have room for you.

Step 4

Calculate how long you will actually spend driving. A good rule of thumb is to estimate 50 miles per hour. You will likely be driving 10 to 20 miles per hour faster than that in most places, but this cushion allows for the fact that you will be stopping occasionally for rest breaks and food. So if your total trip is 1,750 miles, you should assume you will be "on the road" for about 35 hours.

Step 5

Decide how much spare time you have for your journey. Once you have discovered all that you are interested in doing on your trip, determine just how long you have to get from your starting destination to the finish before you can decide which of the activities to do. Take the total time available between the start of your trip and the end and subtract your driving time and your sleeping time plus one hour for every hotel or campground you must check into. Whatever is left is how much time you have for activities.

Choosing Your Activities

Step 1

Narrow down the list of things to do on your trip. Once you know how much time you have available for activities, you can decide how many of the fun adventures or visits you found along your major route that you have time to do. Be generous in your time estimates. Better to plan seven hours for that six-hour hike and be a little ahead of schedule than to underestimate and wind up late for something else.

Step 2

Nail down your route. Once you have chosen the major route you will take, and the activities that are available along that route, you can get a more precise mapping of what roads you will take to reach all of them. Again, mapquest.com or Yahoo maps can help you with this step by showing you specifically how to get from one address to another.

Step 3

Add in hotel rooms or campgrounds. This is the point where you want to put that important factor in. You should comfortably plan on being awake no more than 16 hours per day, including driving and events. A well-rested traveler is going to get more enjoyment out of the daily activities than one who is rushing from place to place and only getting five or six hours sleep at night, not to mention he will be a safer driver.

Step 4

Write out your itinerary. This can be done with pencil and paper or on a computer in a text-editing program like Microsoft Word. It should look something like this:

Monday:
6 a.m.: Leave home--drive x miles to activity at (address and phone number).
1 p.m.: Arrive at x activity for six hours.
7 p.m.: Leave x activity and drive for two hours to campground at (address and phone number).
9 p.m.: Check into campground and sleep.

Tuesday:
6 a.m.: Leave campground and drive x hours to y activity at (address and phone number).

Step 5

Give a copy of your itinerary to a family member or friend staying behind so she will know where you should be and how to reach you if needed, and keep a copy with you in the car in case you need to call ahead to the hotel and tell them you'll be late checking in or get lost.

Tips & Warnings

Planning for expenses like gas, food and hotels/camping is important as well. You should assume when traveling with children that the time spent getting into and out of your vehicle and rest stops will be slightly greater as well. If traveling with small (younger than 10) children, it might be easier on them (and your sanity) to plan frequent, small stops rather than pushing for many hours on the road to get to a single "big" destination.

Planning for expenses like gas, food and hotels/camping is important as well.

You should assume when traveling with children that the time spent getting into and out of your vehicle and rest stops will be slightly greater as well.

If traveling with small (younger than 10) children, it might be easier on them (and your sanity) to plan frequent, small stops rather than pushing for many hours on the road to get to a single "big" destination.

Resources

Article Written By Timothy Allen

Timothy Allen is a full-time pre-law student at Arizona State University studying writing, a published novelist of a book titled "Walking with Angels", and works professionally as a writer for three businesses. He is also a partner in a Professional Employer Organization and works as the company's CIO and webmaster.

Editor's Pick

5 Top North American Wildflower Hikes

Springtime brings a sense of new beginnings and new life as flowers begin to bloom and fill the air with their sweet and pleasant fragrance. Luckily we can see wildflowers all summer long, since spring hits at different times throughout North America. See flowering cactu...
More National Parks...
Popular Article

National Park Substitutes: Great Spots Without the Crowds

Coping with crowds at national parks can get tiresome, especially during the peak tourist season. If you want to escape from the herd, or just take a breather from the bustle of bigger attractions, the United States has plenty of less-visited but still worthwhile spots t...
More National Parks...
Featured Destination

Prevent Yourself from Getting Lost While Hiking

When you're hiking you're going to want to make sure you stay found. What I mean by that is that you've put an itinerary in the car, you know the area that you're hiking to, you know the route and the trail you plan on being on, you know what the trail markers are going ...
More Camping Basics...