How to Plan a Road Trip Route in Six Steps

Planning a road trip can feel like an endless task of tabs, maps, and second-guessing, and the problem is usually not a lack of places to go but a lack of structure to the planning itself. A road trip planned in the right order falls together quickly, while one planned haphazardly produces a route that zigzags and wastes half the trip on backtracking.The first step is to pick the anchor stops, the two or three places the whole trip exists for, and build everything else around them. Second, find the driving distance between those anchors and decide how many days each leg realistically takes, because the map’s estimate and a real day of driving with stops are different numbers. Third, layer in the overnight towns, spacing them so no single day exceeds