How to plan a cross-country road trip

Six to eight hours of driving — roughly 400 to 650 miles on interstates — is a sustainable day for two drivers who swap every couple of hours. Solo, cut that by a third. Plan the longest legs early, while enthusiasm is high, and taper toward the end of the trip.

Divide total distance by your daily ceiling before booking anything. 3,630 miles at ~500 miles a day is seven driving days plus one day of slack — which is exactly how the eight-day plan below came together.

Pick the city that lands closest to your daily mileage target and has real options for food and fuel, then book lodging inside it. Cities anchor the plan; specific properties are interchangeable and can be swapped without touching the route.

A cross-country drive that never pauses is a blur. Put a short leg next to the thing you actually came to see — for us, the Badlands and Mount Rushmore on the approach to Rapid City, and Yellowstone the following morning. A 320-mile day afterward keeps that stop from wrecking the schedule.

The spine is I-90 west to South Dakota, US-14 and US-20 through the Black Hills and into Yellowstone, I-84 and I-15 south through Utah and Nevada, then the final run into Los Angeles.

Fuel dominates: divide total miles by your vehicle's real highway mpg, multiply by the average pump price along the route, then add 10%. Lodging for seven nights and food are the next two lines. Service the car before departure — tires, oil, brakes, coolant — because a breakdown in a remote stretch costs more than the whole maintenance bill.

Long stretches of Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada have no usable data. Download offline maps for every state you cross, save your lodging cities and confirmation numbers where they work without a connection, and expect that anything you post will upload later rather than instantly.