How to plan a road trip with multiple stops

Start with the stops, not the roads. Put every place you want to visit on one map, choose an order that sweeps through them without doubling back, and only then cut the route into driving days. The right tool depends on the trip:

Decide the shape first: a loop that brings you home, or a line from one place to another. Then order the stops so the route never backtracks. On a road trip, backtracking costs hours, not minutes.

• Plot everything first. Parks, a friend's house, the town with the famous diner. Seen together, the natural line or loop usually jumps out.
• Anchor the fixed points. A booked campsite on night three or a concert on Saturday decides where you need to be when. Fit the flexible stops around them.
• Bunch nearby stops into one day. Three sights 20 minutes apart make an easy day; three sights 3 hours apart make a long one.
• Drop the outlier, or make it the destination. One stop far off the line can add a whole day. Either leave it out or build the trip around it.
• On a loop, go out one way and come back another. You'll see twice as much as driving the same highway both ways.

Past eight or so stops, ordering by hand gets slow. In EZRoutePlanner, add the stops, set the start, turn on Round Trip for a loop or pin your final destination for a one-way trip, and press Optimize Route. It orders by distance and doesn't know opening hours or where you're sleeping, so adjust a stop or two by hand afterwards if you need to.

A comfortable road trip day is typically 4 to 6 hours of driving, plus time at the stops. Eight hours or more is a travel day with little time left for sights. Pick your number before you plan, because it decides where every night falls.

1. 1

   Set a daily budget

   Hours at the wheel per day, not miles. Five hours is a good default for a day with sightseeing.

2. 2

   Walk the route in order

   Add up the driving leg by leg, plus time at each stop: an hour for a quick look, half a day for a big park.

3. 3

   Mark the nights

   Where the day's total reaches your budget, the next town with a bed is that night's stop.

4. 4

   Leave slack

   Keep an hour a day spare for fuel, food, wrong turns and the view you didn't plan to stop for.

EZRoutePlanner shows the distance of every leg on every plan, and paid plans add the drive time of each leg, which makes adding up a day quick. On long highway legs, Google Maps' live estimate on the day is the better guide to timing.

Split it. Google Maps takes up to 10 places in one route, your start plus 9 stops, and keeps them in the order you type. For a longer trip, make one route per day, or a chain of routes where each starts at the last place of the one before.

• One route per day is the easiest to follow: tonight's stop is tomorrow's start.
• Send each day's link to yourself by text or email, so each day is one tap away and you're not retyping at a gas station.
• Download offline maps before you lose signal. Google Maps can save an area of the map to your phone for driving without a connection.

EZRoutePlanner's Google Maps export splits an optimized route into links of up to 10 places, each picking up where the last one ended. More detail in how to add more than 10 stops in Google Maps.

Use coordinates. Trailheads, viewpoints, beaches and campsites often have no street address, or one that lands at a visitor center miles from where you want to be. Find the spot in Google Maps, right-click it on a computer (or touch and hold it on a phone) to see its latitude and longitude, and use those in place of an address.

36.05844, -112.10925

In EZRoutePlanner you can paste coordinates as a stop, or click the map to drop a pin exactly where you want to stop. If a pin lands in the wrong spot, the fixes in why addresses land in the wrong place apply to road trips too.

Yes, for the routing part. The free plan orders up to 30 stops in a route, draws it on real roads with the distance of every leg, and exports it to Google Maps or a printable PDF route sheet. It has unlimited routes but keeps them one at a time, so on the free plan you'd plan the whole trip as one route and split it into days yourself.

For a loop that starts and ends at home, see how to plan a round trip route.