Road Trip Hacks

It’s a perfect season for planning a road trip with your friends and family. Being the adult in your family, a road trip allows you to go back to your childhood and refresh some memories spent with your siblings so you want the same for your children to make some beautiful and fun memories that they can relate to when they grow up. A road trip can be one of the most fun experience of your life only if you make it worthwhile.

You can make the road trip more joyous and lovable by being organized, efficient and less stressful if you get the hang of some clever road hacks to be used along with your journey. The road trip hacks can serve as the best tool to help you come out of the minor troubles and worries that you face during your journey and make it a memorable experience. This article will enlist some road trip hacks that will help you to enjoy your dream road trip with your friends and family.

• Long road trips can be boring if you do not prepare for them beforehand. The best and easy way to kill the boredom is by watching your favorite movies or seasons on your tablet. Never watch movies, seasons or use your tablet while driving! If you don’t have navigator tablet or smartphone will be good replacement. However instead of holding the tablet in your hands you can hang it on your windscreen for easy viewing.
• Investing in a travel size refrigerator will enable you to keep your food and beverages chilled, and you won’t have to waste your money and time into buying them. What else could be better than your favorite home food and chilled drinks that can keep your hunger and cravings for unhealthy food at bay?
• Finding cheap and clean restrooms can be a daunting task because most of the public restrooms are in a very pathetic condition. You can find clean restrooms by installing different apps for your phone that would notify you when the next budget friendly clean restroom appears on the map. All thanks to the technology that has made things much easier than they were before.
• There are also apps that help you to find the nearest stations offering fuel at a cheaper cost. This could prove to be a great tool when you are planning your trip on a budget.
• Don’t forget to bring a multi-port charger as it will keep the batteries of all the travelers charged. Long road trips mean you are going to spend more time with your cell phone or tablet. You may use it for availing google maps service, using the camera to capture memories, listening to your favorite music or watching videos, all of this can drain your battery in the first phase of the journey. So if you are not prepared, you will have to spend rest of the journey without a mobile until you find a restroom/hotel to charge your device.
• Bring your own blanket and soft pillow along with you. With so many people you can’t have the freedom to adjust the cooling to your comfort level, so if you feel cold, you can use your own blanket and pillow to rest your head on which would otherwise keep hitting the window and give you a headache.
• Equip your car with an emergency tool kit to deal with any car related problem that you may face during a road trip. Also, it is recommended that you equip your car with the best alarm system to protect it from theft when you leave it in the parking lot or on the road side to discover new places.

About the Author:

Jonathan is an IT expert and a researcher. He is obsessed with cars and all the digital accessories. He regularly posts at www.sakerracing.com

Ilona is an avid traveller from Northern Germany who explores the world through holidays in far-away countries and weekend trips throughout Europe. You can follow her adventures and see her bucket list on her blog.

The Fascination with Bucket Lists

I have a confession to make. I am obsessed with bucket lists. Especially travel bucket lists. I can spend hours looking at other people’s bucket lists. Some of them are very simple, merely a collection of places whereas others include specific experiences around the world. Many of them, like Viivi Severina’s bucket list are a mixture of both.

But what exactly is a bucket list and why are so fascinating?

A bucket list is a list of all things you’re hoping to accomplish before you die. The Bucket List Guy says that there are several possible origins of the word ‘bucket list’. The one I’ve seen the most often is that it is derived from the term ‘kick the bucket’. You see, in the middle ages, when someone got hanged, they would stand on a bucket with the noose around their necks. The hangman would then kick that bucket and the poor person would die.

Not the nicest explanation, is it?

It still doesn’t keep me from being fascinated with bucket lists. I’ve set my wordpress reader so that whenever I go online, all posts tagged with ‘bucket list’ are shown to me. I’ll browse through them and see if I get inspired to add items to my own travel bucket list. I do have a bucket list for other areas in my life as well, but let’s focus on the travel aspect here.

So why is a bucket list so fascinating and why should everyone have one?

Bucket lists will help you focus on your goals. Everyday life will try to throw as many distractions at you as possible. Do you know that feeling of just making it from day to day, reacting to what is happening to you? A bucket list can help you focus on what you really want in life.

This goes for travel bucket lists, too. Everybody knows a destination that is safe and easy to travel to. And we all know how much easier it is to stay at home. No flights to book, no risks to take.

Deep down, you’ve always wanted to see the gorillas in Uganda. But somehow, you never got around to looking up tours and flights. A bucket list can help you focus on what you want to achieve, so you don’t end up spending your holiday sitting around in your apartment, wondering what to do.

A bucket list can also help you focus on areas of the world you’ve previously overlooked. I put down pins on a map for every place and experience that was on my bucket list and quickly saw the ‘white spots’ that I didn’t know much about.

Western Africa, for example. I did a bit of research and quickly stumbled on Voodoo ceremonies – attending one was exactly what had been missing on my list. And on that note, if you need more inspiration for Western Africa, the westernmost point is located next to Dakar and very easy to access. Plus, Senegal is an amazingly easy country to travel through (I highly suggest you go in November so you won’t miss out on the pelican migration).

For me, travel bucket lists are not just about location-specific items. I also enjoy adding experiences that can be done all over the world. Sleeping in an ice hotel, ziplining and hang gliding are just a few examples.

Those items will help you focus on enjoying life. Maybe you can tick off one of them while you’re at home. It’ll shorten those months that are left until your next vacation. Or maybe you’ll realise that your next trip takes you to a spectacular hang gliding location that you shouldn’t miss.

No matter what’s on your bucket list, you will want to work on achieving your goals. I think part of the fascination of bucket lists comes from putting a difficult goal on the list and then not having to think about it anymore. Needless to say that this is not the purpose of a bucket list.

If you end up with all those amazing experiences on a list and then never look at it again, you’ll have the perfect excuse to go on with life as it is. Instead, what you should do, is take out your list over and over again and look at it. Read through the goals and pick one or two to focus on. That is why I highly recommend not only to create a digital bucket list but to also write it down on a piece of paper. That way, you can take it with you wherever you go and it’s always available to look at.

The next step to achieving goals on your travel bucket list is to set a time frame. Those goals you picked, choose a specific date to accomplish them. For example, let’s say you want to visit Easter Island. It’s a remote location and deciding to go there within the next two weeks probably won’t work. But it’s achievable if you set a time frame of two years.

As soon as you start ticking items off your bucket list, or even sooner, you should start adding new ones.

Bucket lists aren’t set in stone. You can add whatever you want. There are no rules for what goes on there and what doesn’t and I think that makes up half of the fascination with them. If you want to learn how to scuba dive, add it. If you want to stay in a tree house, that goes on there, too.

Even travelling to remote and inaccessible places like Somalia is a possible goal. There are no limits because no matter how impossible the goal, if you work hard enough, you will get to that place and you will have that experience.

So what are you waiting for? Go and write your own bucket list. Or just browse through existing ones until you’re so fascinated, you’ll automatically reach for pen and paper to make yours.