The Best Long Road Trip Is Actually Two Short Ones
That old “it’s about the journey” adage? Turns out it’s true.
At some point in every long road trip, you hit the wall. Not literally, I hope, but a figurative wall: You’re on a nondescript highway in the middle of nowhere, you’ve been “about two hours away” for something like six hours, one person is hangry but won’t eat the barbecue-flavored pistachios you got at the last gas station, someone else has had to pee for like 50 miles, and the shuffled playlist keeps hitting only the shitty songs. In other words, it’s all gone to cranky, passive aggressive hell, and it feels like the whole road trip was a bad idea.
But there is one simple solution to avoid all of the ennui, bad energy, and exasperation: Break up the trip.
It’s a straightforward pitch, but splitting up even a medium-length road trip by stopping overnight in the middle has made my driving days infinitely better over the last half-decade. For extended car trips—including ones as short as five hours—add one night at the beginning of the trip to stop about halfway between home and your endpoint, so that you have fewer hours to drive each day. Every leg of the trip feels more manageable, and even if you have to sacrifice one night at the destination, it’s more than worth the trade off to arrive calmer, happier, and ready to enjoy your vacation.
Maybe it seems counterintuitive that stretching your driving over an extra day would relieve stress, but it works. It’s a lot easier to tolerate the tight confines of the back seat of a subcompact SUV—and the sounds, smells, and musical taste of your fellow passengers—in two three-hour sprints than one six-hour marathon. But the real upside lies in the other things you get to experience along the way.
If you’re only planning to drive a few hours, it frees you to emphasize the journey as much as the destination. There’s no real hurry to get to the midpoint, so you can search along the route for new places to stop and stretch your legs, take a kitschy detour to a tourist-trap town, and go way out of your way to a medical office building for the best Indian food in Bakersfield. You can get out at a playground to let the kids run, pop into a random museum, or explore small towns with big monsters, all at a more leisurely pace without the single-minded focus on just getting there.
Shorter drives split across multiple days give you more free time to explore the in-between places, to find cool things to do that an AI-generated itinerary would never—could never—suggest; the stories you’ll get sitting at the bar at a low-rent local steakhouse near the freeway in Tulare would melt its plagiarizing circuits. That is just to say, the quick layover is a way to get to know a piece of the world on a more intimate, human level, especially in an influencer-dominated age of overtourism, set jetting, gig tripping, phenomenon chasing, and hyperbranded travel in general.
The simple act of slowing down, taking extra time, and focusing on the middle ground becomes quietly revolutionary, a recognition of the important things everywhere. It’s a way to spend more time in the overlooked parts of your region, to fill in your mental map of the place you live, and get closer to the leisurely essence of a road trip.
If you wanted to get there fast, you’d be flying.