For instance, at 13 hours, Grand Teton National Park would be a good bet from our house in Santa Fe. For us, 12 hours is acceptable proximity less time is preferable. Pick Somewhere You’ve Always Wanted to GoĪ weeklong trip should put you in range of some marquee destinations, but again, unless you want to spend half your time driving, rein in your aspirations (or consider flying). Again, restraint will deliver higher-quality experiences in the outdoors and less time burning up the highway. Long WeekĮven though nine days-a full workweek and two weekends-seems like a ton of time, it’s still easy to pack in too much travel and too many activities. It will get put away eventually, and I promise you’ll value another day outside more than you would spending half a day cleaning. If you get home late, throw all your gear in a pile, or just leave it in the car. Plan an activity for day three and stick to it. Look, I get that there’s a lot to do-unpacking, cleaning, getting ready for work the next day-but having invested all that time to drive and get away, you should make the most of it. One mistake I see so many people make is devoting the entire last day to getting home. Still, we always consult OnX, our preferred map app, in case there’s easy and stunning public access in the vicinity. Reservation sites (if you can get them) remove the guesswork and wandering in search of that perfect spot. For short weekends, city and state parks and established camping areas are great options, because they allow you to roll up at a site, set up quickly, and get busy recreating. After that, we open the website AllStays. We always start with Google Maps to get a baseline of distances and driving times. Once you know where you want to go, sit down with your favorite mapping software. But the setup and tear-down process is a drag and cuts out precious time for hiking, biking, boating, or just plain sitting. Sure, you can make a loop and see a couple places in one shot.

This might seem limiting, but don’t neglect nearby spots.

After that, you’re getting into “more road time than sleep time” territory. In general, Jen and I prefer to drive four hours or less in a day, six at the max. Obviously, an end goal will drive you, so pick somewhere you want to target. If I have one piece of advice, it’s that less is almost always more. The three-day trip can be the trickiest to plan and execute, because time is short and overdoing it is tempting. My wife, Jen, and I have been living on the road on and off for three years and have developed a dialed process for trip planning. The moral of the story-other than youth often serves up more energy than good sense-is that a good road trip means more than just getting there and back. I barely remember the trip through the fog of sleep-deprived driving. Sure, it lives on as a mythic tale in my personal narrative, but the rush added so much stress over succeeding that I didn’t really enjoy the process. Though I sent the route, I don’t consider that trip a success, other than the fact that we never fell asleep at the wheel. That left a day and a half before we had to load up and return to Colorado in time for work Monday morning.

One evening two decades ago, on a Thursday after work, a friend and I loaded our climbing gear and drove 17 hours from Boulder, Colorado, to Smith Rock, Oregon, where I’d always wanted to climb a classic test piece called Chain Reaction.

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