Newbie needing advice

DrewE wrote:
The itinerary sounds doable to me. You're averaging somewhere in the vicinity of three hours of travel time per day over a five week period. Obviously, some days will be longer and some shorter, but that's not at all an unreasonable pace in my opinion.

The average hours/day only matters if you're going to be driving each day. The OP needs to consider how much of the 5 weeks will be spent STOPPED at the planned locations and how many hours she wants to drive max per driving day.

For example, say I'm planning a trip with 5 identified stops and a max driving time of 5 hours (250 miles) per day and a total of 5,000 miles over 30 days:

On first glance, it looks doable because 5,000 miles over 30 days is only 166 miles/day of driving.

However, I want to spend 2 full days (no driving at all) for 3 of the stops, 4 full days for 1 stop, and 5 full days for 1 stop. That means 15 days are no longer in the equation for driving. So now, it's 5,000 miles in 15 days - or 333.33 miles (6.67 hours) per day.

But wait, the distance between each stop don't equate to 5 or 6.67 hours. That means I have to add additional days to the trip to keep my mileage per day down to my max.


Now, I know many will say I'm making things way too complicated. But, it doesn't take much thought to look at the OP's plan and realize that Arizona to Annapolis is going to take a good chunk out of the 5 weeks - and there are no desired stops in that distance, so it will be a day's drive, crash, a day's drive, crash, and so on until FINALLY you get somewhere you want to be.

What I recommend is to simply identify how many days you want to spend in each location, how far you want to drive per travel day, and then map out your plan including overnight stops on travel days. Are you spending more time on overnight stops than you are on your chosen stops? Then rethink your plan.