Method
Plan a weekend from any American metro
The six trips on this site are examples. This page is the method behind them, so you can run it from wherever you live, including every metro that is not on our matrix.
Step one
Draw the circle before you pick the place
Open a map, put a pin on your house, and find what sits at three hours' drive in six directions. Not three hours as the crow flies, which is useless, but three hours on the fastest signed route on a Friday evening, which is the number the mapping app will give you if you set the departure time.
Almost everybody is surprised by what is inside their circle, because we all have a mental list of destinations that was assembled from other people's trips rather than from a map of our own.
Then sort what you found into six kinds: water, hills or mountains, a historic town, wine or beer country, a park, and another city. That is the grid on our home page, and the reason for it is that most weekends go wrong when two people want different kinds of weekend and only find out on Saturday morning.
Pick the kind first, then the place. It takes ten minutes and removes the single most common argument of the trip.
Step two: check the Friday, not the Saturday
The drive time that matters is the one at 5:00 PM on a Friday, and in every large American metro it is between twenty and seventy percent worse than the number you see at ten on a Tuesday morning. Set the departure time in your mapping app and look at the range it gives you rather than the midpoint.
Then decide which side of the rush you are on. Leaving at 3:00 PM or after 8:00 PM is usually worth more than any other single decision on the trip. Leaving Manhattan between 4:00 and 7:00 PM on a Friday, to take the worst case on this site, can add ninety minutes to a seventy-five-minute drive.
Step three: book the thing that sells out
Every weekend destination has exactly one thing that has to be booked ahead, and it is rarely the hotel. A fish boil in Door County, a thermal bath in Hot Springs, the scenic railway in Blue Ridge, a permit for a popular trail: these go first and they go early. Find yours and book it before you book anything else, because it is the thing that decides which weekend you are going on.
Step four: price it honestly, in five lines
Use the same five lines we use on every trip page, in the same order.
- Gas. Round trip miles, divided by your car's real highway mileage, multiplied by the current price per gallon in the states you will drive through. We use 28 miles per gallon, which is close to the average for a modern non-hybrid sedan on the highway and conservative for a hybrid.
- Lodging. Two nights, and check the tax. State and local lodging taxes are added at checkout and in some cities they add more than fifteen percent to the advertised rate.
- Food. A mix, not an extreme. Two people eating one restaurant dinner a day and handling the rest from a grocery store runs roughly $150 to $200 for a weekend.
- Activities. The bath, the ticket, the park admission, the day use fee.
- Parking and tolls. Small on most trips and the largest surprise on a few.
Add them up before you commit. If the total is materially higher than you expected, the fix is almost always the lodging line, not the drive.
Step five: set the Sunday leave-by time, in advance
Decide it on Friday, say it out loud, and put it in a phone. Working backward from when you want to be home, add the drive, add an hour for the Sunday afternoon return into the metro, and add thirty minutes for the stop you will want and have not planned.
The leave-by times on our trip pages are between 1:00 and 3:00 PM, and they all come from the same arithmetic. Sunday afternoon inbound traffic into an American metro starts building around 3:00 PM and peaks between 4:00 and 7:00 PM. An hour of leaving early on Sunday saves about ninety minutes of driving.
Step six: check the road on the morning
Mountain passes close. Coastal highways slide. Interstates shut for crashes and for construction that was announced weeks ago on a website you have never visited. Every state has a department of transportation road conditions service, most have a 511 phone number, and both take about ninety seconds to check.
Do this on the morning you drive, not the week before, and do it again before you drive home if the weather has changed. This is the only item on this page that has ever saved anyone a night in a motel parking lot.
A note on the seasons that ruin a good plan
Hurricane season on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts runs from June through November, with the peak in September. Wildfire smoke closes trails and ruins air quality across the West from roughly July into October, and it can arrive a thousand miles from the fire. Mountain passes carry traction requirements from about November into April. Spring break, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and the weekend after Thanksgiving are the five weekends when every popular destination in the country is full and expensive at once.
None of that means do not go. It means look it up first, and have the second choice on the list before you need it.