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?

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.  

Where To Begin?

Once the words ROAD TRIP! are spoken, the mind starts spinning with ideas of where to go and what to do. Your first task is to sit with a map in front of you and start planning. The destination is always the hardest part of the whole process. We all dream about where we want to travel to, but where do you start?

When thinking about your destination, you will want to keep into consideration who you are with, what you can see along the way, and how many stops for the night you might have to make.  Make sure you have enough time to get to the destination, do everything you want to do while there and get back home. There is nothing worse than spending money and time and not being able to do everything you want to do.

If you want to go to another province and adventure there, consider flying there and renting a car. It will allow you to have more time at your destination to see and do what you want. It may cost a bit more, but you will save time in the end. I did this when I went to Nova Scotia and PEI with my three friends. It’s an adventure wherever you are with friends.