Lizz We started planning a road trip around the beginning of 2022. For our trip we decided to go from New York to Tennesse for about a week and then go to Massachusetts for another week before heading back to New York. We picked Tennesse because Holly had friends out there that she hadn’t seen in a few years and Massachusetts because we were planning our trip around October and wanted to live out every witchy girls dream.
We did A LOT of planning, I mean I was a little overly detail oriented, and was determined to have a stress free and fun vacation! To help us plan, here’s what we used and other things we may try differently next time.
- Road Trippers
- I really liked using the app to find fun, and interesting to us, roadside attractions and tried to plan one for every few hours. It does have a website version as well and you can invite others to collaborate on a trip. I paid the $29/year price to be able to add as many stops to my route as I wanted.
- Facebook Groups
- These helped so much! Specifically, when it came to Salem, we joined 3 Facebook groups for Salem and read so many helpful posts and got a lot of ideas for things to do.
- GasBuddy
- GasBuddy has a trip gas calculator that we used to estimate the gas cost for our trip. Holly was a little worried about the accuracy of it because it seemed cheaper than we thought at the time. We were worried that the gas prices were going to skyrocket during our trip, but it turned out to be pretty accurate.
- Airbnb
- We booked all our stays through Airbnb. We stayed 2 places in Tennesse, mostly because we changed our plans a few times while booking and one place in Boston which was about 45 minutes to Salem. The first 2 places were amazing and the last one not so much, but we didn’t let it ruin our trip.
- GoogleDocs
- We used google docs to create our itinerary below. We didn’t stick to it 100% but it was nice to have all our activities laid out for us for most days. More on what we did in a future post.
As for what we took on the trip? We tried to be as prepared as possible and made sure to pack food and appliances so we could eat healthier and save money by not eating out as much. We also made sure to pack stuff to have fun with and explore the outdoors along the way.
What about food and appliances?
We packed a simple cooler like this one, an instant pot mini, a nutribullet, and the following food items:
- Prepared Meats
- Seasoned Ground Beef
- Seasoned Chicken Thighs
- Meatballs
- Sides
- Rice
- Potatoes
- Noodles
- Frozen Veggies
- Smoothie Ingredients
- Frozen Fruit
- Frozen Yogurt (we froze gogurt and put a half of one in each smoothie)
- Peanut Butter
- Oatmeal (we used the instant oatmeal packets because it was easier to pack)
- Ingredients
- Alfredo Sauce
- Salad Mix and Dressing
- Jiffy Cornbread Mix
- Frozen Blueberries (frozen from my grandma’s garden)
- Jelly (Some of our home-made Violet Jelly)
- Snacks
- Crackers
- Bananas
- Apples
- Hard Candy (helped with car sickness)
- Grapes
- And I’m sure some other stuff we’re forgetting
Besides our clothes and other necessities, we also made sure to each pack some blankets (here’s the ones we want to get for the future) and travel pillows because we were planning to sleep in the car for a night between each drive. We ended up using this cooler, that we bought to keep the food we wanted to get to while driving, for a foot rest on the passenger side. For our next road trip we’d like to have something like this foot rest.