I get a lot of questions about my travel routine when I’m on a speaking tour, mainly because of all the adventures in between speaking events, so I thought I’d post a rough itinerary of how our normal trips go.
All the times listed below are only approximate. This is just the usual routine, but everything is subject to whimsy, curiosity, and adventure. All my trips are usually me and one up to five kids and my wife.
0700 hrs- Become awoke and go find morning sustenance. This is usually either the free hotel breakfast, a smoothie made in my small mixer, or a protein shake. Food for us on trips is purely for fuel, unless we’re stopping to eat out at a neat local joint we come across.
0900 hrs- Ignite the Max Rockatansky Pursuit Special and hit the road looking for adventure in a roundabout route toward a specific destination, avoiding interstates as much as possible.
*Disclaimer- Not really my car pictured above, but you get bonus points if you know where it’s from.
Three goals for the day-
- Find enough adventure to milk the crap out of life. For us, this is usually hiking, museums, battlefields, or random tourist stops like the world’s biggest ball of yarn or whatever.
- Listen to cool audiobooks for mental adventure. Right now I’m listening to Command Authority by Mark Greaney featuring characters created by Tom Clancy.
- Work and School. If any of the kids are with me, we do work and school while driving through boring spots. They do as much work as they can en route to avoid doing ‘homework’ in the night’s lodging. I also have them take dictation for me. I’ve dictated entire short stories, articles, and memos to my kids while driving. All I have to do is edit and proofread them later. This also saves me some time later at the lodging.
1700 hrs- Start looking for lodging. We usually stay in hotels. Because we have small vehicles with very little room or a minivan with ALL the kids in it, there just isn’t room to camp out often. Camping also takes time to set up, more time than it takes to check into a hotel room. To get the most out of both the trip and working as effectively as possible, i.e. getting a lot done in little time, we prefer hotels. I milk the reward points on these and get a lot of perks and/or free nights.
1800 hrs- Check in, carry bags in, and go swimming or hit the gym. After physical exercise of some kind, sit down and eat supper in the room while watching home improvement shows or Guy Fieri cooking shows on cable TV. We don’t have cable at home, and this is a guilty pleasure. Suppers are usually Mountain House pouches. My favorite right now is the beef stroganoff.
After supper I work more, check e-mails, and create more awesomeness to spread out into the world for a few hours, all the while with the aforementioned TV shows on in the background.
0000 I usually lay down for bed around midnight and read until I conk out, drop the book on my face, and lose my place.
Thanks!
Dr. Redbeard the Wanderer
This message was written by a team of geeks, nerds, gamers, and Dr. David Powers. You can always find us at www.callsignredbeard.com. Thanks for reading!
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