8 Tips for Better Road Trips
Lower your stress and see more of the country by following a few easy guidelines.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
On the Road: From the ideal daily driving duration to what you need in your back seat, we’re sharing advice we’ve gleaned from all our road trips around the country.
January’s Featured Field Guide: Want to plan a visit to Cleveland? Our full list of favorites is available in our brand-new Field Guide to Cleveland — a free download for our paid subscribers! This 38-page dining guide includes a curated three-day itinerary with 25+ vetted recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks.
The Order: A Turkish pasta at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Smyrna makes for a cozy winter dinner.
Weekend Reading: Michigan wines with Martin Sorge, Maui musts from Yolanda Edwards’ Yolo Journal, Buc-ee’s expansion into Ohio, and more.
8 Tips for Better Road Trips
To produce our American Weekender newsletters and Field Guides, we travel around the country a lot. We are just coming off a three-and-a-half week road trip that took us across the northeast and into New England, then down the Atlantic coast to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, across Appalachia, then back through the Midwest before returning home with lots of new restaurants to recommend, favorite bars to share, and plenty of stories to tell.
Long road trips like this are possible because of the research and planning we put into a trip well before we hit the road. We pour over stacks of magazines, read endless online articles, and scour social media. Most importantly, we reach out to our network of talented chefs, plugged-in food writers, and local friends to get their takes and gather their tips.
While we certainly fly when the destination demands it, road trips allow us to see more of the country. Plus, they’re just more fun. While driving through West Virginia earlier this month, we stopped in at Tamarack and snacked on paw paw ice cream, loaded up on pepperoni rolls, and grabbed a few bags of regional potato chips to bring home. On other trips, we’ve stopped at roadside markets for local fruit, gone on hot dog crawls, and had great Jamaican food on an Indiana backroad — all things we’d miss if we didn’t build in time to explore.
On our most recent trip, we thought about all the rules for the road we’ve adopted over the years. These are the tips that work well for us, but we’re always refining and thinking about how we can travel better. So read through our tips and then we’d love yours as well!
Tip No. 1
Plan to drive no more than 5 hours a day.
This is the big one, the best piece of advice we have. If you are planning a trip where you are going to drive, say, 12 straight hours to your destination, just fly if at all possible. It’s not worth wasting an entire day of your trip in the car when you don’t have time to explore. Road trips are about — forgive us — the journey. It’s those in-between places that fall between your starting and ending points that fill in the gaps of what America is all about. Limiting driving time keeps things easy and relaxed. It means you have time for a nice breakfast wherever you wake up. It means you can drive a couple hours and stop for a leisurely lunch. It means time to take the backroads. It means you can finish your drive and check into your hotel in the late afternoon. It means time for cocktail hour before dinner. You have time to explore the town, not merely spend the night.
Tip No. 2
Drive the speed limit.
We’re conditioned as Americans to believe the most important thing is that we “make good time.” But making good time rarely means having a good time. You’re on the lookout for speed traps, you’re constantly trying to get ahead of the next driver, you’re frustrated by semi-trucks that are seemingly always in your way. Driving the speed limit will lower the stress levels in the car. It will free up your mindspace for conversations. And it will leave you more relaxed when you arrive at your destination. We can’t recommend it enough.
Tip No. 3
Plan your stops.
If you think you’re just going to happen upon something cool while you’re driving, well… you might. But you might also be on the highway when hunger strikes and find yourself facing down a gauntlet of fast food options, which range from good (Popeye’s) to unacceptable (Burger King). But nothing you find on the highway will be as delicious as what you’ll find if you take an exit and drive into a nearby town. This requires advance planning. When we map out a drive, we plan our breakfasts and lunches, increasing the odds we’ll hit upon somewhere great. This year, we added access to the American Weekender Google Map as a new perk for paid subscribers. On it, we’ve plotted out all our favorite places we’ve written about, both on the road and off the beaten path. We hope it will make it even easier for you to find great food wherever you happen to be.
Tip No. 4
Queue up podcasts.
Road trips are the best time to get caught up on your favorite podcasts (we can never seem to keep up with them all when we’re home). Two favorites: Joiners, which covers the restaurant and bar industry, primarily in Chicago, and Morning Meeting, the Saturday morning Air Mail podcast that’s like attending a dinner party filled with smart, witty guests.
Tip No. 5
Bring a cooler.
Pretty much the only souvenirs we bring home from a trip are of the edible variety, and sometimes those will need to stay cold. Get a decent-sized cooler — we linked to our go-to in our 2024 Gift Guide — and a few ice packs, and you can take home things like fresh sausages, gourmet cheese, local fruits, and in-season vegetables. We’ll also take leftovers from restaurants with us and tuck those into the cooler. Cold pizza always makes for a great snack.
Tip No. 6
Stock the car.
During the pandemic, we did tons of food pickups. Over time, we built an “eating in the car” kit, which included a roll of paper towels, a small tablecloth we could spread out over the trunk, a couple strong magnets to keep that tablecloth secure, hand sanitizer, and a small collection of plastic utensils. American Weekender reader Jason Burrell even gifted us these trays which come in handy at drive-ins. While we’ve thankfully gotten away from having to eat our meals hunched over the trunk, we still keep these things in case the need arises. Also good: A box of Kleenex in your armrest. A stash of extra napkins in the glovebox. A favorite water bottle, kept filled with ice-cold water at rest stops. A few shelf-stable snacks. High-speed phone chargers are also non-negotiable. You’re going to be using your phone for turn-by-turn directions, listening to podcasts, looking up menus, taking photos, and more. Don’t run out of juice.
Tip No. 7
Upgrade your luggage.
Driving means you can take whatever you want with you, like snow boots in the winter and beach gear in the summer. Our rule: You can bring any-size bag you want, but you need to bring as few bags as possible. When you’re schlepping bags back and forth between the car and your hotel room, having numerous bags gets onerous. We are avid Away fans, and we each bought a Bigger Carry-On and a Medium bag years ago — we’re able to fit the vast majority of things we need for a two-week road trip in these two bags. Bring whatever you need, but just pack smartly.
Tip No. 8
Live in the moment.
The most important thing we’ve learned about road trips is to appreciate the drive. Stop at the scenic overlooks. Take the unexpected detour. Explore. To us, there is no better way to travel.
Have some road trip advice? Share it in the comments!
Download all our Cleveland Recommendations!
Our latest American Weekender Field Guide puts together all our recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks in Cleveland organized into a three-day dining itinerary.
Our Field Guide to Cleveland is included as a free download for all paid subscribers to the American Weekender newsletter. This 38-page dining guide includes more than two dozen recommendations, is downloadable for offline reading, includes Google Maps and Instagram links, and is formatted for your phone — perfect for easy reference on your next trip. Download your free field guide using the discount code found in January’s Weekend Getaway newsletter. (That same code can also be used to download any of our other Field Guides for free!)
Manti at Smyrna
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — The tiny, filled dumplings known as manti are a staple of Turkish cuisine. They’re our favorite dish on the menu at Smyrna, a downtown Charlottesville restaurant that the Turkish chef Tarik Sengul and general manager Orhun Dikmen opened in 2022. The menu melds Turkish, greater Aegean, and local influences and Sengul draws on the skills he honed at New York restaurants under chefs like Tom Colicchio and Joël Robuchon to serve dishes that are homey in spirit but refined in execution. For his vegetarian manti, Sengul fills dumplings with local Sharondale mushrooms, then serves them with garlic yogurt and pepper-butter sauce, as well as shards of dehydrated tomato and herbs. Each little bite is earthy and cozy, and just the ticket with a glass of Greek white wine as you watch the snow fall outside.
707 W Main St, Charlottesville, VA | @smyrnacville
MICHIGAN
Michigan’s Refreshing, Crisp Wines: Friend of the newsletter Martin Sorge recently wrote a primer on Michigan wines for Food & Wine, including eight wines to seek out. “Not only does Western Michigan supply massive harvests of Concord and Niagara grapes for juice and jelly, but it’s also grown fine wine grapes for more than a century,” writes Sorge. “In the last few decades, the state has come into its own to offer world-class wines with distinctive terroir.”
HAWAII
The Maui Food + Drink List: Jenn Rice shares her go-to spots in Maui over on Yolanda Edwards’ Yolo Journal. “Last year, I spent about six weeks on Maui, slowly traveling around the island, letting its rhythms and flavors sink in,” she writes. “The most common question I get from friends these days is whether it’s okay to visit Maui, specifically Lahaina, after the fires. The short answer: yes, and they need support through tourism now more than ever.” Sign me up for a Spam tamago musubi at Shikeda Bento Patisserie.
OHIO
Ohio is getting a Buc-ee’s: If you aren’t familiar with the super-sized gas station and convenience store, Andy Dehus has a primer in The Columbus Foodletter. “One major focal point, and seemingly the axis around which the rest of the convenience store revolves, is a sizable kiosk dedicated primarily to slicing, dicing and slinging Texas-style brisket sandwiches,” Dehus writes. “Multiple employees hack away at mounds of smoked beef behind glass dividers, sliding foil-wrapped bundles down stainless steel chutes in a sometimes futile attempt to keep up with demand from the guests swarming the counter.” Sold.
PLUS
Texas: The Carry On shares 5 Things to Do in Dallas.
California: Danny Palumbo shares some favorite bites from a recent trip to San Diego over on The Move.
Wisconsin: Writing for Midwest Living, Kelly Aiglon put together an itinerary for an overnight visit to the riverside town of Princeton.
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
Want more? Chat with us on Substack, download our Field Guides, check out our archives, or follow us on Instagram @americanweekender. We’ll be back next week.
A well-planned road trip is ripe for memory-making. One of my rules is if I have the time, take a few side roads / get off the highway
Great reminder to fight the urge to "make good time" and actually see something!