You have a Friday evening and a Sunday deadline
Two Tank Trips covers weekend road trips inside 300 miles of an American metro. Every trip is costed line by line for two people for two nights, with the gas price and the mileage stated, so you can see whether you can afford it before you read about it.
Drive-time matrix: nine metros and six kinds of weekend
| From | Water | Hills or mountains | Historic town | Wine or beer country | A park | Another city |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago, IL | Door County, WI 4h15 | Galena, IL 3h00 | Springfield, IL 3h30 | Fennville, MI 2h15 | Indiana Dunes NP 1h15 | Milwaukee, WI 1h30 |
| Dallas, TX | Broken Bow Lake, OK 3h15 | Hot Springs, AR 5h00 | Jefferson, TX 3h00 | Fredericksburg, TX 4h15 | Caddo Lake SP, TX 3h15 | Austin, TX 3h15 |
| Atlanta, GA | Lake Burton, GA 2h00 | Blue Ridge, GA 1h45 | Savannah, GA 3h45 | Dahlonega, GA 1h15 | Great Smoky Mountains NP 3h00 | Chattanooga, TN 2h00 |
| Seattle, WA | Anacortes and the San Juans 1h45 | Leavenworth, WA 2h15 | Port Townsend, WA 2h30 | Yakima Valley, WA 2h15 | Olympic NP, Hurricane Ridge 2h45 | Portland, OR 3h00 |
| Phoenix, AZ | Page and Lake Powell, AZ 4h30 | Flagstaff, AZ 2h15 | Bisbee, AZ 3h30 | Verde Valley, AZ 2h00 | Grand Canyon NP, South Rim 3h30 | Tucson, AZ 1h45 |
| New York, NY | Montauk, NY 3h00 | Phoenicia, NY 2h15 | Hudson, NY 2h15 | North Fork, Long Island 2h15 | Delaware Water Gap NRA 1h45 | Philadelphia, PA 2h00 |
| Kansas City, MO | Lake of the Ozarks, MO 2h45 | Eureka Springs, AR 4h30 | Hannibal, MO 3h15 | Hermann, MO 3h00 | Tallgrass Prairie NPres, KS 2h00 | St. Louis, MO 3h45 |
| Denver, CO | Grand Lake, CO 2h00 | Estes Park, CO 1h30 | Leadville, CO 2h00 | Palisade, CO 4h00 | Rocky Mountain NP 1h45 | Santa Fe, NM 5h45 |
| Minneapolis, MN | Duluth and the North Shore 2h30 | Lutsen, MN 4h15 | Red Wing, MN 1h00 | Lake City, MN 1h15 | Apostle Islands NL, WI 4h00 | Milwaukee, WI 5h15 |
The trips
Six weekends, fully costed
Six metros, six destinations, each with a Friday evening departure, a full Saturday, a Sunday leave-by time, and the same cost sheet in the same order.
-
Chicago to Door County
Seventy miles of peninsula with Lake Michigan on one side and Green Bay on the other, five state parks, and a fish boil.
- One way250 mi
- Drive4h15
- Gas$56
- Total for two$621
-
Dallas to Hot Springs
A national park that is a main street, forty-seven thermal springs, and two bathhouses where you can still take the water.
- One way290 mi
- Drive5h00
- Gas$59
- Total for two$549
-
Atlanta to Blue Ridge
Ninety-five miles from downtown Atlanta to a mountain town with a scenic railway, a national forest and no traffic.
- One way95 mi
- Drive1h45
- Gas$20
- Total for two$540
-
Seattle to Leavenworth
Two hours over a mountain pass to a Bavarian-themed town with genuinely excellent hiking behind it.
- One way120 mi
- Drive2h15
- Gas$37
- Total for two$667
-
Phoenix to Sedona
Two hours north and four thousand feet up, into red rock, and twenty-five degrees cooler than Phoenix in summer.
- One way115 mi
- Drive2h00
- Gas$28
- Total for two$603
-
New York to the Hudson Valley
Sixty miles up the river to mountains, a working art scene and the one trip on this site you can do without a car.
- One way60 mi
- Drive1h15
- Gas$15
- Total for two$660
The rule
Two tanks, and why that is the constraint
Three hundred miles is roughly two tanks of gas in a normal American car, and it is also roughly the furthest you can drive on a Friday evening and still have a Saturday. Past that, the drive eats the weekend.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. A five-hour drive each way is ten hours of a fifty-two-hour weekend, which is nineteen percent of it spent in a car, plus the recovery on either end. At two hours each way it is eight percent and you barely notice.
So every trip on this site sits inside that limit, and every trip page opens with the drive time rather than with a photograph, because the drive time is the thing that decides whether the weekend works.
The second rule is two nights. One-night trips do not work: you spend Saturday recovering from Friday's drive and then drive home. Two nights gives you a full Saturday and a half Sunday, which is the actual product.
The third is the Sunday leave-by time, which every trip page states. Most weekend trips are ruined at the end rather than the beginning: you stay one attraction too long, hit the metro at the wrong hour, and arrive home at nine with work in the morning.
Nothing about any of this is glamorous and all of it is the difference between a good weekend and a tiring one.
Method
Why every trip has the same cost sheet
Because "a weekend away" can mean three hundred dollars or fifteen hundred, and almost no travel writing tells you which. The cost sheet on every trip page has the same five lines in the same order: gas, lodging, food, activities, parking and tolls. Then a total for two people.
Gas is calculated rather than guessed: miles round trip, divided by 28 miles per gallon, multiplied by the regional pump price on the date printed. That last number moves weekly and varies by more than a dollar a gallon between states, so the page tells you to substitute your own. The mileage is the part that does not change.
Lodging is a mid-range shoulder-season range and excludes state and local lodging taxes, which are added at checkout and vary by city. Food assumes a mix of groceries and restaurant meals rather than either extreme.
The result is six trips whose totals run from $540 to $667, which is a much narrower spread than people expect and is the most useful single fact on this site.
What we do not do
- We do not publish a trip we have not driven, in the season we are describing.
- We do not take payment from a hotel, a restaurant, a tourism board or an attraction, and we do not accept hosted stays.
- We do not publish fabricated reviews, invented testimonials or star ratings assembled from nothing.
- We do not quote a cost without saying what it assumes.
Plates
What a weekend actually looks like
-
The last twenty miles. The part of a weekend trip nobody photographs and everybody remembers: the county road at the end, after the interstate. -
Where you stop. Budget one real stop each way. It is the difference between a drive and a transit. -
Two nights, not one. The second night is what makes a weekend trip work. One night means you spend Saturday recovering from Friday. -
The Sunday problem. Every trip on this site has a leave-by time on Sunday. Ignoring it is the single most common way a good weekend ends badly.
Byline
Written in Kansas City, driven from nine metros
Kenji Alvarado has lived in five American metros in fifteen years and spent most of the weekends in all of them driving somewhere within three hundred miles. Kansas City is the current one, and it is the best of them for this, because almost everything is three hours away in some direction.
The cost sheets and the logistics are kept by Priya Whitcomb, who used to do route and cost planning for a coach operator and who will not let a number onto this site without an assumption attached. Corrections go to [email protected].