How to survive a cross country road trip with your best friends

I recently came home from a week long road trip stretching from Massachusetts to Colorado and back. For 53 hours straight, I drove across the country with my younger sister and best friend – all of us Massachusetts natives and none of whom had ever seen the midwest before. It was sure to be an adventure.

I’m sure many of you are wondering how four girls managed to spend an entire week together in a car without wanting to kill each other – especially when two of the girls are siblings. Well, here is what we discovered to keep our sanity and still get in as many adventures as possible.

Make a plan, but keep it loose

If you are worried about your plan too much, then you will waste your precious time and energy worrying or having anxiety about getting to a certain place at a certain time and keeping to your schedule. We decided to leave with 14 hours of leeway, that way we could chose to do something else on the way or go straight to Colorado and sleep in the car when we got there. It ended up allowing us to spend extra time in Chicago, sleep for four hours in Madison, WI and to visit Mount Rushmore!

Prepare music!!

I’m one of those people who needs music playing around her 24/7. Whether I am sitting in my room, going for a walk, or doing chores – I’ve got something on. So, naturally, I prepared many a CD for this trek.

The key is variety. I had old school Taylor Swift, some Glee and a few other fun mixes to throwback to, but also some classics like Billy Joel, Simon and Garfunkel and my MANY MANY Spotify playlists. We had everything – pop, rock, indie, country, musicals, blues, alternative, you name it. You can’t listen to the same thing the whole way or you will go insane!

I also found that I preferred to listen to my own music in headphones when I was trying to sleep in the back – especially when my sister and friend were blasting the Rent Soundtrack in the front seat.

Music is pretty much the only entertainment, so bring a lot.

Take shifts

My mother told me that it was imperative that the person who was shotgun stay awake with the person driving, but don’t take this quite as seriously. We found that the person “navigating” was just as tired as the rest of the passengers. As long as it was a long enough time between changes in direction, the passenger took the opportunity to nap, with the promise that the driver would pull over or wake up the front passenger when they were beginning to become over tired.

Pack healthy food

Imagine how you would feel being stuck in a car for several days straight.

Now imagine how you would feel if you were only eating junk food/snack food the entirety of the ride. You would feel pretty shitty the whole time, right?

To avoid this, we stopped for main meals (like dinner) and we packed things like granola bars, celery and peanut butter, vegetables and hummus and bags of lettuce with dressing so that we could make an on-the-go salad when needed.

That way, we could snack, but we wouldn’t feel so guilty about it and we would feel a little more like people as we were driving.

Don’t be afraid to change your plans last minute

This helps to enhance your sense of adventure as you are driving. Be open to the ideas that your other explorers suggest. I proposed the idea of experiencing mount Rushmore to my sister and friend and they were all for it! We embraced that sense of spontaneity, and the fact that we built in time for those opportunities allowed for us to really love and accept those changes with ease and excitement.

Splurge every now and than

We mainly splurged with time, and in relation to Dunkin’ Donuts.

You can take the girl out of Massachusetts, but you can’t take the Massachusetts out of the girl. We had some weird sixth sense when it came to Dunkin’ Donuts, but we always seemed to crave it when it was near.
This led to us going out of our way by several miles to reach the only Dunkin’s in the entire state of South Dakota, Wisconsin, AND Nebraska! We hit a Dunks pretty much whenever possible. Find out what your car will be willing to splurge on and GO FOR IT!