The Solution to Car Travel Blues

With the holiday’s around the corner  I know a lot of us will be spending time with family and friends. If you are like us, this will mean a lot of driving in order to make this happen. As you are thinking about all these trips you may be dreading all of the not so fun things that come with car travel. But fear not , there is a fun way to truly make your holiday vacation a holiday vacation. That solution is taking that drive and creating a mini road trip. It will add so much more fun to the monotony of driving and add natural stopping points. Read on to learn how to plan and make it happen to create your trip.

Although it does add some time to your trip, making your travel route into a road trip with pit stops really breaks it up. It adds excitement to what can be, especially in the midwest where we live,  a very monotonous ride. Depending on how much extra time you have ,who your companions are and what your interests are you can plan what kind of spots to check out to accommodate whatever you need. Then you have two great ways to plan it.

The first way towards your mini road trip is to hit up google maps (or if for some reason you use some other map search engine) and really check out the various cities you pass through from point A to point B. If you are a heavy GPS user like us you may not even realize what all you are passing through on the way to places you may go all the time. From there you can do a search of what attractions are in those cities to see if there are any fun sites or restaurants worth a stop on the way. This is my main road trip tactic and it’s a tried and true process.

The second way to plan that we discovered recently is through a really helpful site https://www.roadsideamerica.com. It only works for trips in the United States but you can search by state or go to the map and find pinpoints on your route. It has tons of different museums, historical markers and a lot of obscure roadside attractions like the bouncey horses pictured in the field below. This was really great for us because we were going to have the dog with us on this particular trip and could find things that only required us to pull over and check out or were mostly outdoors. Another benefit of these kind of stops is that they require no further planning or reservations or cost. This made it easy for us when we decided to skip one of our pre-planned stops in order to save some time with no stress.

Spend a bit of extra time prepping and you can turn a standard holiday drive into something fun, adventurous and spontaneous. Plus you get to explore your surroundings and maybe like us, find some really cool hidden gems. Safe travels from the Mitchells!