While potentially boring and monotonous, road trips offer a comprehensive way to explore the country. By breaking your road trip up into reasonable stages and including stops at various attractions, you can help make your road trip more interesting and engaging. The Internet offers a number of travel planning websites that allow you to quickly plan your journey, make overnight reservations and research local attractions---making your road trip easy and fun.

Travel Planning Websites

Use one of the Internet travel planning sites such as Rand McNally, Yahoo! Trip Planner, MapQuest, AAA TripTik or TravMatrix to map your overall trip. Map the distance from your beginning location to your ultimate destination first; you can enter the specific points at which you wish to stop at a later date. See Resources for a comparison of travel planning websites. These free online resources allow you to determine the overall length of your trip, as well as factor in the stops along the way. Since these sites offer free travel planning, you should look at several of them to find the one that you feel will work best for your purposes. Look for sites that offer superb ease of use, as well as the number of miles/cities covered by their mapping feature. If traveling in a more remote area, you might consider purchasing more detailed travel planning software or books. If you will not be able to access the Internet on your trip, print out itineraries and consider bringing an atlas or a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit with you.

Calculating Stopping Points

Utilize your map of the trip and a simple mathematical calculation to determine the distance you wish to drive on each stage of your trip. Use an average rate of 60 m.p.h., multiplied by the number of hours you wish to drive each day. While you might average more than 60 m.p.h., bathroom breaks and fuel stops will cut into your overall speed. Driving 10 hours a day, for example, means you can cover around 600 miles in a day. Try not to be overly ambitious when planning your driving time. You might encounter roadside attractions that you absolutely must see or a charming roadside diner that you want to stop at for pie and coffee. You will almost certainly find the constant traveling exhausting; on longer trips, make sure you plan some days with minimal driving times.

Finding Hotels and Attractions

Use your hours of daily driving calculations, as well as your selected travel planning website, to find hotels and attractions along your route. Some websites, such as the AAA TripTik, allow direct access to a reservations portal so you can make your reservations at various hotels on the same site you use for trip planning. Try to reserve as much as possible in advance to avoid arriving at your destination and being unable to find lodging. You might want to check other travelers' opinions of hotels and attractions in the areas by using travel review sites, such as TripAdvisor. The travel websites will also offer some suggestions on local "must see" attractions. If an attraction will take several hours to see, factor that into your overall trip. Make sure you arrive at these points during daylight hours or times when the various attractions will be open.

Source:

Travel Directions, Trip Planning - AAA

TravMatrix

Yahoo! Trip Planner

Resource:

The Web's Top Automated Road Trip Planning Programs

Rand McNally

Trip Advisor