Plan a road trip

“When I planned my first road trip back in 2017, the only thing I prepared in advance was a list of places I would like to see. I knew that we would pick up our campervan in Cairns and would return it eight days later in Sydney. I did not know how tight this timeframe would make our schedule. The driving time itself was more than 19 hours, but it seemed doable in 7 days. We were determined to see everything so we did not really consider the fact that it would be best to adjust our plans. As can be expected, things did not work out the way we planned them. Looking back, I should have expected as much. We did not even check out the ferry schedules to two islands we wanted to explore, or any prices or places to stay ahead of time. We had to skip things on our list left and right. And we often found ourselves desperately looking for a place to stay long after it had gotten dark and roos had taken over the streets. In the end, the road trip was still amazing, but it could have been a lot less stressful!”

“Neither of those trips ended up going the way I had planned. After taking a number of road trips in the last nine or 10 years, though, I almost think expecting the unexpected can pretty much be counted on as the norm. Of course, it’s a little difficult for things to go according to plan when your plans were only half-baked to begin with. This was certainly the case with the East Coast Extravaganza. [...] All of this might have been possible if I’d had a couple weeks — but I didn’t. I had four days and I was trying to do way too much. So what happened? The first half of my travels, getting from Michigan to Vermont by way of Canada, went just fine [...] but after two days of exploring in the Green Mountain State, I spent a large chunk of the next two days in the car, just driving. Two hours of a rainy Saturday were spent in Boston, but almost everything else — Providence, each of the Connecticut stops, NYC — was a mere drive through. And Camp Crystal Lake? Scratched from the itinerary altogether.”