The Ultimate Step-by Step Guide to Planning Your Cross Country Road Trip
My cross-country road trip existed in my head as an idle daydream for over 4 months, but the plan for its execution was born in one day.
photo from my first day on the road
I was a graduating Senior at UCLA and naturally, as my college career began coming to a close, folks started asking me what I was going to do after graduation. I didn't really have an answer for them. To some, I said I would work. To others, I said I might go to grad school. But the truth is, I wanted to travel. I just had no idea logistically how to begin.
In the back of my head, I fantasized about taking the summer to travel across the USA. I had a vision of myself, pulled off a two-lane freeway by a field, reading in my open car trunk as a breeze carried over the sweet aroma of flowers and the sound of songbirds. But I had no idea how to make it happen. Like many Seniors in college, I had little free time, extremely limited funds, and a lack of the experience I thought I needed to accomplish such a giant undertaking.
Like many Seniors in college, I had a lot of self-doubt and fear. But as I read article after article about women who took a leap of faith to follow their dreams, their overarching message seeped into me: do it scared. I wanted to prove to myself that I can do hard things- starting by bringing my cross-country road trip into existence.
Unlike many travel bloggers I follow, I didn’t quit a corporate job to pursue my dream of traveling the world. I don’t have much experience with, well, anything. I have incredible imposter syndrome (Who was I to travel solo across the country? Who am I to write this blog?). And I made it happen anyway. I hope that if you come across this blog and find yourself similarly doubting yourself, you can take some inspiration from my story to help make your own dreams come true- whether that looks like a road trip across the United States or simply picking up a guitar and finally learning how to play.
“To my fellow perfectionists out there, do things badly, wrong, half-assed, awkwardly, whatever. Even 1% of effort leaves you 100% better off than you were.”
If this experience taught me anything, it’s that dreams come true not when we are prepared or know what we are doing, but when we have the audacity to go for them anyway. To my fellow perfectionists out there, do things badly, wrong, half-assed, awkwardly, whatever. Even 1% of effort leaves you 100% better off than you were.
OKAY! That out of the way, let’s get into my planning process.
Planning
Once I embraced the fact that I wanted to travel across the United States, I had to create a plan of action. I opened a google doc and brain dumped, writing down everything I wanted to include in the trip: destinations, experiences, people, etc. For example, I decided I wanted to explore at least one cave, stay in hostels in Colorado, and visit my friends in Texas. Then, with my idealized list to reference, I shaped the skeleton of my route.
part of my idealized trip brain-dump list
I wanted to travel through the South and knew several specific locations that I wanted to visit (such as Santa Fe, NM and New Orleans, LA). I also wanted to visit my family in Maryland for a while. Thus, Maryland became a rough marker for my halfway point, as well as the furthest state I would travel to.
I got myself a physical map of the United States from AAA (AAA members can get free printed maps of a plethora of destinations) and highlighted the locations I absolutely wanted to visit. I am a sucker for a good visual aid and having a physical map to mark on helped me conceptualize my trip. Then I filled in the gaps.
I reached out to people I knew along the route and asked if I could stay with them for a night or so. Couch surfing helped me save some money, and more importantly, it gave me the opportunity to connect with people I hadn’t seen in a long time (in some cases, people I hadn’t seen since I was little). As you can imagine, everyone had such interesting and unique lives and we had so much to learn from each other. Additionally, as locals, they had trustworthy insider tips about places to visit nearby.
Then I connected the dots on my map, highlighting a first draft route across the United States. This route changed a bit from destination to destination, but from there, I only added other destinations to my itinerary if they were generally along that path.
In a perfect world, I would have improvised my entire trip and traveled without a schedule at all. For safety reasons, however, I knew I should probably not sleep in my car when I visited big cities, so I wanted to book accommodations early to get the cheapest price possible.
With a general route in one hand, and a trip wishlist in the other, I sat down at a cafe on one fateful day and quite literally planned my entire trip in a handful of hours. My final itinerary took me out of California, through the south into Texas, where I would pick up a friend, up to Maryland, and then back to Texas, where I would drop that friend off again. From there on, I had no plan. I figured I could plan my route back home while I was on the road.
Itinerary
I opened another google doc and wrote out a timeline. Beginning with the day I planned to leave California, I wrote every date (e.g. July 20) and underneath, I wrote bullet points of important information about that day, including:
Where I was starting and ending my drive (TX —> New Orleans, LA)
^ An estimate of how long the drive would take (8 hr 6 min)
I used google maps to find this estimate)
Reservation Details for accommodations, National Park entry tickets, etc. including:
location name
address
check in/ out times
cancellation policy
total price of reservation
screenshots of the reservation confirmation
Important notes, like if I needed to begin driving at a certain time in the morning to make an appointment later that day
Potential activities available around the location, such as
a nearby national park
a nearby landmark
a nearby museum
a nearby attraction
a well rated bar
etc.
For example, in New Orleans, I wanted to listen to jazz music on Bourbon street, so I wrote down the name of several possible bars, but when it came to it, my friend and I decided to just walk around until we heard some music we liked.
For another example, in Washington D.C. I listed the names of all the Smithsonian Museums my friend and I liked, and trusted that when we got there, we would go to whichever one we were most interested in at the moment
Estimated prices of activities I planned for the day, such as
cost of parking (e.g. $5)
admission cost of potential activities (such as the entry cost to the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.)
activities I already booked and paid for (such as a ghost tour in Charlotte, NC that I booked on trip adviser)
Information about potential places to sleep in my car, such as
dispersed camping spot coordinates
Love’s Truck Stop addresses (they always allow free overnight parking)
Walmart Parking Lots that offered free overnight parking
neighborhood streets that allowed overnight parking (according to my research)
Showers!!!
or rather, if I would have access to a place I could shower (my portable shower remained a safe backup)
Once my itinerary was finalized, (after I booked all my accommodations), I downloaded it offline so that I could still access it if I didn’t have internet service.
I truly wrote down everything I could think of that would relate to that day on my trip, so that when I was actually traveling, I wouldn’t be overwhelmed trying to figure out what I was doing. I always had the freedom to decide what any given day would look like, but in a stress- free way because all my options were listed in one, organized place.
Some days I wanted to rest or deviate from my itinerary, and other days, something completely unexpected popped up and grabbed my attention. In Nashville, my friend and I wanted to get lunch, found a well rated restaurant, and when we arrived, we discovered that an enormous Tomato Art Festival was taking place up the block and we spent the day listening to live music, browsing artist booths and eating from food trucks.
Money
My budget for this trip was super dependent on the estimated cost of gas. Fuel Economy Trip Calculator was a useful tool for estimating this cost. I input information about my car and an itemized list of all the stops on my road trip from beginning to end, and it provided me with information about approximately how many miles I would drive, as well as the estimated cost of gas.
example cross country trip
Of course, this is only a rough estimate, but it was a good place to start.
I wanted to check it against a more accurate gas price estimate, so I had to do some elementary school level math (yuck).
I researched the average mpg (miles per gallon) of my specific car. It gets approximately 21 MPG on freeways and 15 MPG in cities. Almost all of my driving would be on freeways, but I rounded my MPG down to 20 to unofficially average it out.
Then, I researched how many gallons of gas my car could take. The answer was about 19 gallons. If I could go 20 miles per gallon of gas and my car held 19 gallons, then I could drive approximately (20*19) 380 miles on one tank of gas.
I went back to the Fuel Economy Calculator to see how many miles it said I would drive on my trip- the answer was about 5,500 miles. 5,500 divided by 380 is 14.47, meaning I would have to refill my tank approximately 14 times.
HOWEVER, on my actual trip, I’d likely deviate from that straight- line path a fair amount, so I rounded up to 20 to be super safe (better to spend less money than expected). In other words, I would probably have to refill my tank 20 times on the trip.
The national average price of gas is currently $3.58.
My car takes 19 gallons
19* $3.58 = $68.02
So the cost of one tank of gas would be approximately $68.02
^ If I wanted to get super specific, I could have looked at where I would be every 380 miles on my route (AKA where I would be when I needed to refill my gas) and used the average price of gas in that state to get a more accurate cost estimate. But that felt super extra, even for me.
If the approximate cost of one tank of gas was $68.02 and I would have to refill about 20 times, then I would likely spend about (68.02*20) $1360.40 on gas
Once again, I did some unofficial rounding up of the numbers and estimated that I would spend about $1500 on gas.
The next cost to think about was food. I hoped to do most of my own cooking on the road and estimated that I would likely spend an average of $15 a day on food. My road trip was originally supposed to take 35 days, so I planned to spend approximately 35*15 = $525 on food.
Accommodations would be the last major expense to consider. Deciding to sleep in my car saved me a lot of money, as did couch surfing, but I still had to pay for accommodations when staying in big cities. I compared prices on Kayak, Vrbo, Airbnb, and Expedia to find the best prices. For camping spots and hostels (which were considerably cheaper than full on accommodations), I compared prices on Recreation.gov, HostelWorld, and Hipcamp.
I ended up needing most of my “real” accommodations during the part of my journey that my friend would be joining me, meaning each of us only had to pay for half of the accommodation price. Ultimately, over two months of traveling, I spent around $450 on accommodations, including hotels, motels, hostels, trailer parks and campsites.
Other expenses to plan for included an annual national parks pass ($80), parking costs in cities ($100), and the inevitable traffic ticket ($100).
All told, I estimated $2755 in unavoidable expenses (1500+ 525+ 450+ 80+ 100+ 100).
I was willing to budget $3000 for my trip, in the hopes that I would spend less when it came to it. Thus, $245 remained for nonessential expenses (i.e. recreational activities like museum admissions, souvenirs, iced coffee, etc.)
I ended up using about $100 to book activities in advance (such as a ghost tour in Charlotte, NC) and reserved the rest to spend on the go.
Saving
My trip budget was $3000. That was about $3000 more than I had to spend on travel. My funds for this trip ended up coming from a plethora of different places, including graduation gifts, savings, and mostly, money from work.
For a college student, saving $3000 feels a lot like hunting for a unicorn: like an impossible task. But let’s break it down a bit and make it feel more possible.
I was in my final quarters at college and had approximately four months to save $3000 for a summer road trip. That’s 16 weeks. Over the course of those sixteen weeks, I planned to save (3000/16) $187.50 each week.
Minimum wage in California is $15.5, meaning I would have to work about (187.50/ 15.5) 12 hours each week. That’s three 4 hour shifts each week (or three 8 hour shifts every two weeks). It was doable. I saved money from work, from graduation, from garage sales and from selling my clothes on Depop (shameless plug).
In the end, I hit my goal of $3000, and stuck to my budget as well as I could on the road, in order to make it last. My unofficial rounding up of the numbers during my budgeting stage paid off because I ended up spending an extra month on the road. The final cost of my road trip was slightly over $3000.
The decision not to plan my trip past Texas also turned out well. When I passed through New Mexico on the first part of my journey, a friend asked me if I could house- sit for two weeks when I came back from Texas (extending my trip that much longer). In the last weeks of my trip, I also added Los Angeles to my itinerary- something I hadn’t even considered before I got on the road.
Before I left, I was so worried about all the things that could go wrong and all the ways in which I was unprepared to be away from home. I was entering a completely unknown situation with no safety net. But once I was away, being away got easier. I learned to trust myself and my judgement. I had planned and prepared. Now, I just had one more hurdle to overcome: embrace uncertainty and open myself up to the possibilities.
My confidence and internal sense of freedom grew, and best of all, I proved to myself that I can do hard things, even if I have to do them scared. Because in the end, the scariest thing would have been giving up before I even started, and never knowing what could have been.
