The car
What is actually in the car
This is not a shopping list. It is the contents of a bin that lives in the trunk, most of which cost nothing, plus the four things worth spending money on and the reasons why.
Advertising and affiliate disclosure. Two Tank Trips is paid by the advertisements on this page. Where a page links to a booking site or a retailer, that link may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes what we recommend. We take no payment from any hotel, restaurant, attraction or tourism board. Full terms in our Affiliate and Advertising Disclosure.
The bin in the trunk
A plastic tub, roughly the size of a milk crate, that never comes out of the car. Everything in it is there because something went wrong once.
- A gallon of water and a half dozen shelf-stable snacks, replaced twice a year.
- A paper road atlas. It has been useful about four times in ten years and each of those four times it mattered.
- A phone cable that is longer than you think you need, and a wall charger, because hotel bedside outlets are always in the wrong place.
- A headlamp, which is better than a phone flashlight for anything that needs two hands.
- A small first aid kit, a roll of paper towels and a trash bag.
- An emergency blanket and a pair of gloves, which weigh nothing and make an hour on a closed pass survivable rather than memorable.
- A quarter tank of gas you never spend, which is a habit rather than an object and the most useful one here.
The four things worth buying
A tire gauge and a look at the spare
Underinflated tires cost fuel and fail more often, and a spare that has been in a wheel well for six years is frequently flat. Check both before a long drive. Many newer cars have no spare at all and carry a sealant kit instead, which works on a nail and not on a sidewall, so find out which one you own before you need to know.
A jump pack rather than cables
Sweater cables require a second car and a stranger willing to help. A lithium jump pack requires neither and lives in the bin. Charge it twice a year. This is the single best piece of equipment on this list for a trip that ends anywhere with an empty parking lot.
Offline maps, downloaded before you need them
Free, thirty seconds, and it is the difference between a detour and an hour of driving in the wrong direction. Several trips on this site have dead zones long enough to matter: the climb to Stevens Pass, the Icicle Creek drainage, the Chattahoochee National Forest, parts of Oak Creek Canyon. Download the region while you still have signal in the last real town.
An annual pass, if you will use it three times
The federal America the Beautiful pass covers entrance at national parks and standard amenity fees at many federal recreation sites, and it pays for itself quickly if your weekends point that way. Regionally, a Northwest Forest Pass in Washington and Oregon, a Red Rock Pass around Sedona, and state park annual stickers in Wisconsin, Texas and New York all do the same arithmetic. Check the current price and what it covers on the issuing agency's own site before buying, because both change and neither changes on a schedule.
What to leave at home
A cooler, on most of these trips. It takes up the whole trunk, it needs ice twice a day, and every destination on this site has a grocery store. The exception is a long desert drive in summer, where water in the car is not optional.
A roof box, unless you own one already. It costs three to four miles per gallon at highway speed, and on the Hudson Valley trip it also rules out the parkways entirely, because they have low stone bridges and a height limit.
Most of what a gear list would tell you to buy. Two nights is not an expedition. If you find yourself buying something specifically for a weekend trip, and it is not one of the four things above, you are probably solving a problem you do not have.
Before a long drive
- Tire pressures cold, including the spare, to the number on the door jamb sticker rather than the number on the tire.
- Oil, coolant and washer fluid, which takes four minutes.
- Wiper blades, if it has been more than a year. A summer storm on an interstate is the wrong moment to find out.
- The route, checked on the state department of transportation road conditions page for every state you will cross.
None of this is interesting and all of it is the difference between a weekend and a story about a weekend.