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Part of Five fields every entry needs: how highway itinerary planning actually works
Where you sleep matters more than travel miles in a highway itinerary plan
How to place overnight stops in a highway itinerary: measuring distance in driving time, checking services, and knowing which nights to book firmly.
What to take away
- Measure distance to a bed in driving time, not in miles. Remote roads make those wildly different.
- The overnight point is the load-bearing part of the plan. Choose it before the stops.
- Check services separately from the bedfuel, food after six, water and coverage.
- Book the night that would be hardest to replace and keep the rest flexible.
Where you sleep decides how a highway itinerary behaves. A well-placed overnight makes two ordinary days work. A badly placed one turns both of them into driving.
Miles are the wrong unit
On unpaved approaches, mileage is close to meaningless. The BLM's page for Sand Wash Recreation Area in Utah is blunt: whichever route you take, once off pavement it is roughly 25 miles of dirt road and about an hour and a half of driving.
Pavement vs Dirt Road
Paved road
- Distance
- 25 miles
- Driving time
- About 30 minutes
- Unit to use
- Miles
Dirt road
- Distance
- 25 miles
- Driving time
- About 1.5 hours
- Unit to use
- Time
Twenty-five miles sounds like half an hour. It is not. Always convert to time before deciding a place is close.
That page also lists what is and is not there: primitive campsites and four reservable huts, vault toilets, picnic tables and fire rings, with no running water and no trash service, and a fourteen-day stay limit. Read that list before you plan an evening around a site.
Put the overnight in the right place
Choose the overnight stop at the halfway mark by driving time, not distance. Check three things: late fuel, food after six, and whether the approach's final hour is a road you want to drive tired.
If any one fails, move the overnight, not the plan. If the last hour fails, the same logic applies to travelers with access needs who build recovery time into the plan.
Public campgrounds attached to a route work well because they remove the approach drive entirely. Shelf Road in Colorado follows an old stagecoach route toward Cripple Creek and was built as a toll road in 1892.
It has two camping areas: Sand Gulch with 14 sites and a group site, and The Banks with 33 sites and two group sites, on a dirt road the agency describes as easy and passable in a two-wheel-drive vehicle. Sleeping on the route means the morning starts where the interest is.
Check services, not just the bed
- Fuelis anything open after eight, and how far is the next station?
- Foodis there a kitchen, or only a gas station cooler?
- Wateris drinking water available, or are you carrying it?
- Coveragewhere does the signal end, and is anyone expecting to hear from you?
- Weather exitif a road closes overnight, is there a second way out?
Which nights to book
Book firmly where the alternative is a two-hour drive: a single motel in a small town, a campground with few sites, anywhere on a holiday weekend. Keep the rest loose. A fully booked itinerary loses its ability to absorb a bad day, and on a highway trip that flexibility is usually worth more than the small saving from booking early.
Slot each bed into the five-field entry format from our guide to how highway itinerary planning works. If this is a first long trip, read the honest-distance advice in tips for a first long drive before choosing how far apart to place them.
