Setting The Mood

No road trip is ever complete without your favourite tunes. Driving down the highway with the windows down cranking your jam is one of my favourite parts of road trips. Picking the right tunes is a chore in itself. Picking the right music will determine the kind of road trip you are going to experience.

When thinking of what music to put on your iPod for the trip, think of having many different genres and artist to select from. If you are in your car for 8 hours a day getting to your destination, you can get tired of the same music playing over and over again. Picking a lot of different genres will allow you to play to your mood at that moment of the day. Feeling mellow and in the moment enjoying the scenery, you may play more subdued music or feeling bored and need a pick me up, play some upbeat classic music that you can car sing to and rock out to.  Always put some of your guilty pleasures that you don’t let others know about. Especially if you are travelling alone, who’s going to stop you....no one, have fun with it!

Stuck on what kind of songs you should be looking for, here is a list of few websites that have compiled some of the best tunes to play on your next road trip.

20 Essential Songs for your Road-Trip Playlist

Top 100 Songs You Need To Take With You

Top 500 Road Trip Songs

You sometimes forget what songs are out there until you see lists like this. What are some of your favourite songs to rock out to on long road trips? Are you a car star?

It's Not Always About the Destination

While on road trips it’s not always the destination that’s important, it’s also what you see along the way.  When planning my cross country move to Calgary, my friend and I sat down and planned our route, hotels and then started looking up all the different ‘Largest Things’ in Canada. No road trip is ever complete without seeing the largest monument or statue in the country/world. A drive that could have taken us four days we stretched out to seven days to fit all the largest things into our drive. We mapped out how to get to them and had all the addresses written down that we followed. We mainly stayed to the Trans Canada Highway and did not venture too far out of the way because we did not want to waste too much time.

Sometimes as you drive you find random things to stop at like my friends and I when we drove all over Nova Scotia. We were driving down the highway and looked to the left and saw

a random large Native American statue. So of course we had to stop.

Another fun thing that I just heard about from a co-worker when I told her about this blog was Geocaching. Geocaching is a scavenger hunt across the country. People have hidden boxes you can find with treasures that other people have left. Once you have found the box, you sign the guest book, take the treasure and leave your own treasure for the next person to find. You can plan road trips around finding these which kind of sounds fun. I will have to definitely remember this when I go on my next road trip. 

To Stay or Not To Stay

The next big decision in your road trip planning is what hotel you want to stay in. If you are going on a road trip with no set destination in mind, it is hard to plan your route and plan where you will stay each night. If you have a set destination, it is best to plan your stay before you leave, distinguish how long you want to drive each day and factor in the daily stops along the way.

Benefits of booking your hotel stays earlier is better rates, ease of mind at the end of a long day of driving and checking to see if the hotels are sold out before you get there.  If you are to stay in a small town along the highway you can usually just pull in and get a room, but the big cities can sometimes be difficult to find a room some nights. There can be big corporate conferences in town or festivals that take up the rooms. For example, in Calgary majority of hotels are sold out Monday thru Thursday because of corporate meetings and conferences happening with the large oil companies. Weekends you should have no major issues, unless it is the two weeks of Calgary Stampede.

St. Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia (Bay of Fundy)

If you use websites like Expedia, Travelocity or Hotels.com, majority of the rates you will pay is non-cancellable or non-refundable, so if you are to book with those sites, you have to be 100% sure you are staying there. Your best bet is to book through the hotel website itself. Most hotel rates on their websites are the lowest rates you will find. Always read the fine print to make sure of the cancellation policy before you book anything.  

Before You Start....

Before you head out on your journey, there is one thing that you must know very well, your mode of transportation. Be it a car, motorcycle, RV or bicycle, your mode of transportation is the most important part of a road trip. Be comfortable with your vehicle, know the good and bad sounds, know how many kilometres you can go on the highway before you need to fill the tank, take your vehicle into the shop for an inspection, check the oil, air pressure in your tires, fill up on windshield fluid, etc. There is nothing worse then driving down the highway and your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

Purchase a CAA membership while traveling, even if you get it just for the journey and you cancel it. It is worth paying the membership price then having to find a tow truck and spend a few hundred dollars to get the car towed.  While travelling it would be better to splurge on the CAA Plus membership because if you need a tow it will tow you up to 250 km before they start to charge you for every kilometre after that. The basic membership will only tow you up to 10 km, it could get expensive with the cost of repairs.  As the Scouts say, Be Prepared.