Road Trip Diary & Tips

As mentioned in previous posts, I spent the holiday weekend in Ottawa, Canada visiting family for a little reunion. From where I live it is about an 8 hour drive. I’m not new to road trips as I have been on quite a few. As I have family in Canada I went up to various cities in Canada on long weekends and in the summers when I was younger as well as going on other little road trips to much of the eastern seaboard. I documented some road trip tips through pictures of my recent road trip.

1. Prepare some food and/or snacks for the road in case you don’t want to stop for a meal or if you like to snack and want some food in between stops.

 My family likes to bake a ham to make ham sandwiches on a road trip (obviously only good for getting to the destination). My mom and I baked a ham, sliced it and bought a loaf of Italian bread from a bakery to take with us on the trip.

2. Dress comfortably because you’re going to be sitting in a car for hours.

3.Stop whenever you need/want to for snacks (Tim Horton’s since we were Canada bound), to go to the bathroom, get gas, or even just to stretch your legs. A big tip to go along with this is to look up rest areas in advance. You don’t necessarily have to go to only these stops, but it’s good to know where there are stops just in case. It’s not fun to put off getting gas because you can wait until the next stop or exit you get to only to find that you’re on a stretch of road with no exits for 50 miles! So it’s good to know if the exit or rest/service area you are approaching is the last one for a while.

4. Bad weather sometimes occurs when you’re on the road. Just take your time and don’t panic. The beauty of road trips is that most of the time you don’t have to be somewhere by a certain time i.e. no flight to catch.

5. Like bad weather, there’s going to be traffic that you can’t avoid. There’s always going to be construction at some stretch of the road and most likely at some point in your trip you’ll hit rush hour. Again, just take it in stride because there’s nothing you can really do. You can make a sandwich with the ham you made to pass the time 🙂

6. Before heading home, you will not have all the snacks and things to choose from like at home so it’s a good idea to make a stop to the supermarket to pick up some water/beverages and snacks in case you want to munch on something until you stop for food.

7. The last tip is to bring good music. I enjoy satellite radio as much as the next person, but it can become very repetitive. I probably heard “Fancy” 5 times within a 2 hour period.

Those are some of my road trip tips! Hopefully they will be helpful to any of you going on a road trip this summer. Please share any tips you have!