Make The Great American Road Trip Even Greater

Apart from peanut butter flavored anything, there is nothing greater than the Great American road trip. It’s that feeling of total freedom as you leave your everyday worries choking on the dust in your rearview mirror, the hood of your car pointed loosely in the direction of your destination, a classic soundtrack playing through the stereo as you eat up the tarmac for eight hours a day until you eventually ride into that part of the world you’ve always wanted to see firsthand.

Like we said, nothing is greater than the Great American road trip. That said, there are certain hacks you can add to your trip that will make it a whole lot more-awesomer (how’s that for terrible-yet-understandable English!).

So, without further ado, round up a few of your closest mates (the ones you can live with in a car for a couple of weeks), print out our advice and enjoy the most memorable trip of your life.

1. Have The Loosest Plan Ever

And by loose we mean knowing how long you have to get from point A to B, maybe plot out which cities you want to stop in along the way, don’t plan for any more than eight hours driving a day and then let the madness unfold in the best possible way. Hilarity springs to mind.

2. Don’t Ruin The Surprise

Nothing has the ability to cripple a road trips wow-factor more than researching what lies ahead. That means no Instagramming a city, no Googling a hotel, no spoilers of any kind. Road trips are meant to be raw adventures into the unknown, so let them be. Let them take you to the weird, wonderful and hidden gems of the world - not the tourist traps.

3. Don’t Let Surprises Ruin You

Road trips aren’t exactly prone to disaster. You’re driving for eight hours a day, sometimes through bad weather, or at night, or both. That means disaster can strike. Our advice: have a roadside assistance company on speed dial, know how to get help after an accident, have a phone charger in your car, know where you are at all times and, yeah, all that jazz. It may be boring, but it beats being stranded in Hicksville with no phone service and a car with three flats.

4. Only CDs Allowed

Not music. A CD. Which, for those who don’t know, is a round disk that can fit between 12 and 18 songs on it (depending on how long the songs are). Trust us, nailing the road trip CD is as much an art as it is a rite of passage. You need songs that you won’t get bored of listening to over and over again, and without skipping any. This may seem stupid, but years from now, when one of these songs comes on the radio, you’ll be transported back to this very road trip. Cool.

5. Games Ain’t Just For Kids

No road trip is complete without a bunch of games, which is why you need to unleash the “I spy with my little eye”, child within you and go on the hunt for some games while away the hours of wind through hair and big skies. Warning: this requires a healthy dollop of creativity. Some we’ve come up with are: counting how many times we spot the word chicken on billboards, the Boring Film Game Challenge and recasting ourselves in famous movie scenes. These are where it’s at.