In which trek travels

We spent a lot of time in the minivan during the past two weeks: clan trek was on a road trip! We took our time driving down to Walt Disney World, spent almost a week there, and then took our time driving back home. While number guy was driving one afternoon towards the end of our extended excursion, I thought I should jot down all of the good ideas we had on this trip.

These are things that worked for us on our recent road trip. Anyone who employs these tips does so at their own risk. We assume no responsibility.

trek's road trip travel tips

• Clothing. Even if you are absolutely, positively certain that you do not need long pants or a sweatshirt or a rain jacket, bring one of each anyway - just in case. Restaurants and movie theaters can be air conditioned down to arctic temperatures. You'll feel great when you first walk indoors after a time out in the blazing sunshine but by the end of dinner you will really wish you hadn't left that toasty warm sweatshirt back home on the top shelf of your closet. Also, if the weather should turn unexpectedly foul frigidly wet week, you will be warm even in shorts if you layer your wardrobe: rain gear over sweatshirt over tee shirt over tank top. The long pants will come in handy, too, if the family/friends whose guest room you are mooching with whom you are visiting on Tuesday night should happen to want to take you out to a nicer restaurant. Have at least one collared shirt in your suitcase to cover this possibility.



• Towel. Toss a kitchen towel in your vehicle. Not only does it have a 101 uses, it will also mark you as truly hoopy frood. You might even want to grab two or three towels as long as you are in the kitchen.



• Trash bag. Pack one or two plastic grocery store bags into your vehicle's map pockets or glove compartment to use for trash collection on the road. If you are driving a minivan or an SUV, see if you can loop one bag handle around the armrest of each of the front bucket seats: instant hanging trash can. Dispose of your trash at least daily or more frequently depending on how number of passengers, ickiness of said trash, and ambient temperature.



• Fruit basket. Certain fruits, like apples and bananas, fare very well without refrigeration. Other fruits like peaches and nectarines also have a pretty good shelf life at room temperature. Load up a wicker basket with your fruits of choice. Remember to add a small cutting board, a knife, and a melon baller, too. The shotgun passenger gets conscripted to serve as the Fruit Sous Chef. One chop cuts an apple in half and then all your FSC needs to do is to remove the core from each half using the melon baller. Wipe off the knife and melon baller with the kitchen towel.



• Cooler. Load up a small cooler with your favorite refreshing beverages and some ice before leaving home,. Individual soft drinks and fruit juices are really expensive on the road. Why pay $3.00 for a 20-ounce drink at an Interstate rest area vending machine when you can buy a six-pack of the same thing at your grocery store for less? A small cooler also provides you with food flexibility. You can bring your favorite brand of yogurt, for example, and not have to worry about local availability issues.



• Fluids. Filling your tank with gasoline and being sure you get your oil changed before a big trip should go without saying. Now that that is handled, remember to monitor the fluids of the vehicle's passengers. Drink plenty of water. Remind the kid(s) to drink up as well. Yes, this means you will be making more frequent pit stops to deal with all of that water but this is okay. It is desirable, even. Accept this. It is not just healthier for your body, it is also safer for you and those with whom you are sharing the road. Tired drivers are more careless. Drivers who stop every hour or two to stretch their legs are more alert and safer. Change drivers every other pit stop, too.



• Spoons. You'll need a spoon in order to eat your yogurt or applesauce or what have you. Cold cut sandwiches get old day after day.



• Global Positioning System. If you do not have a GPS, get one and then familiarize yourself with its features. Our new one can locate points of interest near current location, near destination, and along route. This last one is the best: only those POIs ahead of you are displayed. If your vehicle has a power outlet in the back, hook the kid(s) in the backseat up with the old GPS. It is worth hours of entertainment and eliminates the "are we there yet?" refrain. Be sure to have the kid(s) mute the secondary GPS: there is nothing more distracting than that particular backseat driver.



• Grocery stores. Everybody needs to eat. Let your GPS locate the nearest grocery store for you. Refill your fruit basket and cooler then swing by the deli department for a few slices of Virginia ham and lacy Swiss. Bakery departments are usually good about selling you a single roll. Ta da! Lunch on the go. We call these "car picnics". You eat healthier than the fast food options available on the Interstates and save your restaurant dollars for a nice dinner at the end of the day. Grocery stores also have clean bathrooms.



• Club cards. Corollary to the grocery store tip, always, always, always ask for the club card key tags for the grocery store chains along your route. It can save you a lot of money. Don't chuck it when you get home, either, squirrel it away for the next road trip. We still have our Food Lion club card from our vacation in Ocean City, Maryland four years ago and Food Lions are all over the southeast. Oh, yeah: make sure you use your real home phone number so that they can look you up at the register if you forget your card.



• Drug stores. Some drug store chains also have club cards. We needed something from the drug store one day, so I walked over to the Rite-Aid next door to our hotel. I happened to walk down the clearance aisle and there I scored a new lunch box for Neatnik for only $5 thanks to the club card savings.



• Convenience stores. Certain convenience store chains can also be your friend. We discovered that all Wawa gas station/food store locations are built on the same blueprint: the bathrooms are always down the hall to the left side of the cash registers as you enter. Ladies' room is the first door on your left. Thank you to the nice young lady at the Wawa deli counter who did not charge me for the butter I needed for Neatnik's (leftover) roll.



• Laundry basket(s). No, not for laundry. Ever noticed how when you go on a road trip you have things that you really don't want tumbling around the trunk or cabin of your car? A middling sized laundry basket is the answer to the clutter. We used one for corralling our spare foot gear, rain jackets, and baseball hats. A second basket held a Brita pitcher, an electric kettle, tea supplies, the kitchen towel, reading materials for the Neatnik, and the fruit basket rode on top.



• Zip top bags. Tuck a few small zip top bags in with your kitchen items. You never know when one might come in handy.



• Audiobooks. Some people really love audiobooks, others do not. We here at chez trek like to listen to books in the car if they are ones we have previously read in print. Harry Dresden accompanied us on our recent trips. Since these are not appropriate reading/listening material for the Neatnik, we bought a Y-connector for our headphones so the FSC and the driver can share the same mp3 player. The FSC can listen with two buds but the driver uses only one for safety reasons. Using the 'buds also means that the offspring in the backseat could use the integrated DVD player and wireless headphones at the same time.



• Laundry. You aren't using the laundry baskets for laundry but you are still generating laundry. You really don't want to put the dirty clothes back into your suitcases with your clean clothes, so what is a hoopy frood on the road to do? Simple. Stuff your daily dirties into either plastic hotel laundry bags or grocery store bags and stow the resulting "laundry bubble" in your vehicle. You can pretty much tuck them into any unused gaps and spaces. This keeps the clutter in your hotel room down to a bare minimum and housekeeping will thank you for not leaving your unmentionables strewn all over the floor. Note: For the truly OCD organized, separate your bubbles by wash load. All the whites together, all the tee shirts together, etc. When you return home, all of your wash is already sorted for you and you can empty the bubbles directly into your washing machine. Another benefit here is that if you own only a few laundry baskets, you can simply leave your dirties in the bubble until you are ready to pitch them into the washer...tomorrow.



• Medications. Many of us take medications on a daily basis. Even if you don't, you're probably taking a multivitamin. Before leaving home, get a seven-day pill organizer and fill it with your vitamins and medications. Our trip was longer than seven days, so we brought our meds in a dedicated tote bag which we only removed from the car for a refill on Friday evening. After restocking the pill organizers, this bag went back into the car.



• Hotel hopping. Let's face facts here: if you are on a road trip, you are going to be staying in a different hotel every night. If you are lucky enough to have friends and/or family along your route, you might be able to save some money on lodgings, but you will still be sleeping in a different bed every night. Who wants to lug a full suitcase in and out of the car for each one night stay? Not me. Instead of unloading the whole car every night, we had a designated overnight bag. When we arrived at our destination du jour, we pulled out jammies and the next day's clothes from the suitcases and stuffed them into the overnight bag along with a few books. The only other stuff that had to come into the hotel was the toiletries kit and the laundry basket with the kitchen supplies. In the morning, we returned the jammies to the overnight bag, made the day's laundry bubble, and hit the road without stress. Another thing we did that eliminated the "oh, my gosh, I left something behind in the hotel" fear was to stage our checkout. We moved all of our stuff closer to the door as we readied it for departure. We also shut off the lights in the "clear zone". Nothing was allowed to move farther into a darkened part of the room. I have to say that this particular trick worked extremely well: we did not lose anything on this trip.



• Consultations. Unless your have traveled your route frequently, chances are you don't know where things are on your journey. It is time to talk to the concierge and/or front desk staff. Face it, these people live within commuting distance of your hotel. There's a good chance that they know where to get good food. You are not limited to eating only at national chain tchotchke restaurants.



• Refrigeration. Refrigeration in your rooms, while nice to have, is not universally mandatory. Sure, if you need to keep medications or breast milk cold, you need a refrigerator. Other than that, you can get by without a room fridge for a night. You already have a small cooler in the car keeping your potables potable. If your room is not equipped with refrigeration, don't despair and don't upgrade your room. Dispatch one member of your party to the ice machine and refresh your cooler's supply as soon as you arrive at your hotel room and also just before you check out in the morning. We were able to keep leftover cold cuts on ice just fine overnight.



• Substitutions. If your final vacation destination is at an all-inclusive resort or a locale for which you have purchased a meal plan, ask what your meal options are at each and every dining facility. While we were at Disney, we had a Disney dining plan. We learned that three "snacks" could count as one "quick service" meal. Swapping in three snack items for a quick service meal allowed me to have fresh fruit cups for breakfast instead of eggs and bacon. If your dinner entrée comes with something you cannot eat or do not enjoy, ask your server if they could substitute steamed vegetables or fresh fruit. The worst they can say is "we do not have that." More likely, though, the restaurant will be able to accommodate your dietary needs.



• Rude neighbors. After a long day of driving, all we want to do is toss our overnight bag on the floor, locate some nom-ables, and cash out for the night. What we do not need nor want are next door neighbors slamming doors, blasting their television, and generally making nuisances of themselves. Sadly, some people seem to think that they are the only ones in the hotel and treat the entire facility as if it were their own private rec room. We were first given a room overlooking one of the quiet pools at our Disney hotel. By the second night, the people in the pool were shouting so loudly that we requested a room change. Within half an hour, we were situated on the other side of the property, far from any of the pools, and instead of being stressed out about the noise, we all got a decent night's sleep. On the way home, we had a similar experience with the intoxicated next door neighbors. Despite requesting assistance from the front desk at 11:00, 11:30, 12:00, and 12:30, the neighbors still kept us up. The next morning the manager comped our room - and those of everyone else who had called to complain about the noise level and the nuisances were evicted.



• Chat up. Other travelers can be a mighty useful resource. If you see someone else down in the lobby poring over a map, why not try chatting them up? You have common ground and maybe you can help each other out. We got an alternate route suggestion from a fellow hotel guest which took us off the Interstate and onto a state route. It may have been a little slower since there were some traffic lights, but we didn't cram four whole hours of driving into a tiny eight hour slot on the way home like we did on the outboung journey.



• Remember. Above all, remember that you are on vacation. Relax. Unplug. Enjoy yourself and your family

Do you have road trip tips? Leave a comment and share them with us!