Have you ever had the desire to exchange your day to day routine for one of extended travel? Do the words "Road Trip" conjure up magical images of National Park hopping, sunsets, and long stretches of time to reflect?
For most of us, there is a gap between the utopia of extended, uninterrupted world exploration and our actual day to day routine. The dream of the open road is brought back to reality when faced with the responsibilities of feeding the dogs, PTA meetings, and paying the bills. As with most big ideas, the key to actually doing something of this magnitude lies in proper planning and goal setting.
Photo By DennisSylvesterHurd
If a major road trip is your goal, Live Your Road Trip Dream should be on your reading list.
Live Your Road Trip Dream is the work of Phil and Carol White. They're experts on the topic of yearlong travel. After careers in business they "opted for the road less traveled", so to speak. After a significant amount of research and planning, they packed the essentials into a 19 Foot Chevy Class B van and hit the open road for a year. In their travels they drove from the West Coast to the East Coast, and everywhere in between including more than 35 National Parks.
Live Your Road Trip Dream is both a blueprint that explains how to plan an extended road trip, as well as a chronicle of their trip.
How they did it.
The first half of the book focuses heavily on planning. They systematically consider the logistics of financing an extended trip, transferring important responsibilities, constructing a realistic budget, and planning an itinerary. As they dissect these topics, they share their approach and specifics about how they solved each problem. In addition to discussing things and places, they also spend a fair amount of time exploring the "people" element such as breaking the news to family members, missing important events, and, of course, the obvious issue of getting along with a traveling companion 24-7-365. One of the most valuable elements of the book, in my opinion, is the detailed planning worksheets that are found in the appendix. These include sample budgets, to-do lists, a list of supplies, and even a primer for RV systems.
Their Trip
The White's make a point early in the first chapter that the purpose of the book is to help the reader build a plan for their own adventure. The second half of the book, a journal of the White's trip, is offered as a guide to spark the imagination. Although I appreciated the planning techniques, it was the journal that I enjoyed the most.
Since they started their trip in the Pacific Northwest and immediately started working their way south to Yosemite, most of the journal entries early in the second half are places that I am very familiar with. I enjoyed seeing these places through their eyes. Our family recently drove through Eureka California, a topic in one of the "Phil-osophies" sections of the book. Although Phil's story about a summer job in Eureka is only a couple of paragraphs long, it seems like this could easily be the topic of a prequel novel. The journal entries were also the subject matter of a column in their local newspaper called "On the Road with the Whites". As their adventures began to unfold, it quickly became the most popular column in the paper. I can see why.
Setting a big audacious goal always carries an element of risk. The proper response to risk is to make a plan. When you have a big goal and proper planning, wonderful things can happen. At its core, Live Your Road Trip Dream is a book about doing just that: Turning a dream into a plan, and turning that plan into reality. If your big goal involves a long road trip, Live Your Road Trip Dream should be on your reading list. You can pick up a copy of LYRTD at Amazon.com or you can buy directly from Phil and Carol White by visiting their website at http://www.roadtripdream.com/.