Who writes this, and how it is paid for

How this started

I moved five times in fifteen years for work: Sacramento, then Atlanta, then Seattle, then Phoenix, then Kansas City. Every time, the first eighteen months were the same. I would land in a new metro, spend a year telling myself I should get out of the city on the weekends, and not do it, because the planning always cost more than the trip seemed to be worth.

What broke the pattern in Atlanta was a colleague who kept a laminated index card in her glove box with six places on it and the drive time to each. Not recommendations, not a list of the best anything: just a map of what was within reach, so that on a Thursday you could decide in four minutes instead of spending Thursday evening researching and then not going.

That card is the whole idea behind this site. The matrix on the home page is her index card, scaled up to nine metros and six kinds of weekend, and the trip pages are what happens when you actually drive one of the squares.

Why the costs are on every page

Because the single question that stops people from going is "what is this going to cost", and travel writing almost never answers it. A weekend away can be three hundred dollars or fifteen hundred. The difference is mostly one line, lodging, and almost nobody says so.

So every trip page here carries the same five-line cost sheet in the same order, with the assumptions stated: gas at 28 miles per gallon and a dated regional pump price, a mid-range shoulder-season room, food that mixes groceries and restaurants, and the parking and tolls that people forget. The totals across six very different trips land between $540 and $667, which is the most useful single thing on this site.

The numbers are ours, they are dated, and they will drift. Fuel prices move weekly. Lodging in a mountain town in October is a different market from the same town in April. Where a number is time-sensitive we date it and tell you to check. Where we could not verify a number at all, we write the guidance without it, which is why some pages tell you a permit is required and do not tell you what it costs.

How it is paid for

Two ways, both of them disclosed. The advertisements on these pages are sold programmatically, and we do not choose what appears in them. Some links to booking sites and retailers may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, disclosed above the link on the page where it appears, not buried in a footer.

What we do not take: payment from a hotel, a restaurant, an attraction, a tour operator or a tourism board; hosted or discounted stays; paid placements presented as editorial; guest posts; and link insertions. No one has ever paid to be on a trip page here and no one can. If that changes we will say so on this page before it changes anywhere else.

We also do not publish fabricated reviews, invented testimonials, or star ratings assembled from nothing. There are no user reviews on this site, which is a deliberate choice rather than a technical limitation.

Who does what

Kenji Alvarado, founder and editor, drives the routes and writes the pages. Priya Whitcomb, who spent nine years doing route and cost planning for a regional coach operator, keeps the cost sheets and the drive-time matrix, and will not let a number onto the site without an assumption attached to it. Between us we have driven every mile described on these pages, in the season described.

About the photographs

The photographs on this site are licensed royalty-free stock images, credited with their source in assets/images/CREDITS.txt. They are chosen to show the kind of landscape a trip runs through rather than to document a specific moment, and where an image was made somewhere other than the exact place under discussion, the caption says so. The portrait above is a licensed stock photograph used to represent the editor rather than a photograph of a specific private individual.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than from a reader who drove on it. Corrections go to [email protected] and are made on the page, with the date. Our full standards are on the Editorial Policy page.

Where we are