Road-Trip Tips

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Drive, don't fly - and save -- Tightwad - You have fabulous locations in mind for your family trip. The problem? Airfare is the thing. The thing you can’t stomach, especially when you factor in tickets for the kiddos. Do you really need to break the bank or could there be another way? Consider driving. After all, it’s the journey, not the destination. You can miss a lot of beautiful, funky spots from an airplane.

Have a Snack for a Travel Break - If you start getting sleepy during a long driving trip, try having a snack. Research has shown that taking a food break is more effective than taking a short rest for improving driving performance and keeping you awake. Also, between a rest of fifteen minutes or one hour, there is no discernible difference to driving performance.

Building An Emergency Car Kit: Going Beyond the Basics -- The Prepper Project - A car kit is different from a Bug Out Bag in that it is meant to stay in your vehicle at all times. The contents generally assume you will be sitting tight until help arrives. If you are preparing for an EMP scenario, or are otherwise concerned about being able to make it back home in an event of an emergency, you should include supplies for trekking it on foot. A ‘Get Home Bag’ requires different gear, so right now I’m just going to mainly focus on what you need to pack to survive a few days in your car.
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Use a Salad Spinner For Quickly Drying Small Clothing Items -- Apartment Therapy - Here's a quick tip I learned from friends who regularly go car camping: they always bring a large size salad spinner with them, just in case they find themselves needing to wash, then dry a t-shirt, socks, or intimates...

Also, to the right, is a short (5min) video reminding you of some of the basics of doing laundry while on road-trips.  (The Naked Gardener adds, "That is, if you are the type of people who wear clothes when traveling by car. It must be hard, living with shame about your nakedness!")
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Pack Your Own Food - Even if you eat at "cheap" places like McDonald's, you'll still be forking over around $10 per meal per person. Most likely you won't want Rotten Ronnie's three times a day for a week, so count on at least $15 per meal to dine elsewhere. That's around $45 per day per person. It's much cheaper to pack a cooler with your own food - plus, I don't travel to see what the Denny's restaurants look like in other towns. Packing your own food tends to get you eating in much more spectacular venues, like roadside pull-outs with a view, or nicely manicured inner-city parks. On trips where you are traveling for multiple days, simply stop in at the grocery store each day and spend 20 minutes or so buying food for the day. This easily saves $30 per day per person, and over a week long trip that's $210/person. Nothing to sneeze at!
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Cottages are Sometimes a Better Deal than Motels - I like traveling to Vancouver Island. In fact, I often fantasize about moving there. (I lived there as a child and it was a great place to live). I have gone there several times now and I've found it cheaper to rent a cottage than stay in motels because the cottage has cooking facilities and I can cook my own food instead of eating out. (See above point). While I could get a motel for around $80/night (plus tax = $90/night), I found this spectacular ocean-front cottage in the village of Maple Bay for $800/wk. Now yes, it is more than a hotel at about $115/day, but since I determined not eat at restaurants if I stayed at the cottage, I still came in cheaper. The motel would have cost around $135/day if I included eating out three times a day, while the cottage cost around $125/day including the food I bought at the grocery store and cooked/packed myself. It's not that whopping of a savings, but instead of a dreary motel to hang out in, I had a 600sf oceanfront cottage with loads of privacy, a hot-tub, a dock, and gobs of scenery and wildlife to drink in. That makes it a very good deal indeed!
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Buy a Tent - Quite often when you're traveling, you don't rent a motel until late in the day and then leave early in the morning - while paying full price for a room you've hardly done anything in but sleep. Two years ago, I brought my elderly mother to my hometown, which is located about a 12 hour drive north of here, and this trip would definitely incur "over-night expenses." Since I knew I was going to be staying for a few nights (after I dropped off my mom at relatives), I decided to buy a tent and some camping gear rather than stay in a motel. Hotels would have cost $90-$100/night, and I was going to be gone for a few days. So, I bought a tent at Walmart for a little over a $100, and a variety of other camping gear. In total, I came to around $200, and if I recall correctly, I spent three nights in the tent, costing about $75 in campground fees. This eliminated +/-$300 (-$75 camping fees) in motel expenses while leaving me with about +/-$200 worth of camping gear I still have and can use any time I want, all for approximately the same price as if I hadn't tented for three days. Both of the campgrounds I stayed in had hot-shower facilities, although, I did find buying firewood from Ranger Rick to be a scam at $5/bundle, which only kept the fire going for around 2 or 3 hours. If you can, pack your own firewood in the trunk rather than paying for it.
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Related:
How to do Road Trip Picnics: Where to Stop and Other Tips to Make Them Easy -- Eat at Home Cooks
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