Hit the road smarter

You'll never road trip the same way again if you follow these tips

Imagine you and your spouse or family finally decide to make that dream drive to the Grand Canyon; windows down, coffee in hand, not a care in the world. You've got a rough idea of the route, and you've already bookmarked a few quirky roadside spots along the way. Sounds perfect, right? Well, it can be, as long as you go in with a little know-how. From planning your route wisely to keeping a record of every memorable moment, the right habits can turn a good road trip into a truly unforgettable one. These 10 tips will help you do exactly that.

Picture this: you're driving through the Texas Hill Country, laser-focused on making it to San Antonio by noon, when you blow past a hand-painted sign that says "World's Best Peach Ice Cream, 2 Miles." You don't stop. You regret it forever: rigid itineraries can rob you of the best stories.

On the flip side, having a general plan keeps you from driving three hours in the wrong direction. Use a map or app to sketch your route the night before, mark a few must-sees, and then permit yourself to wander.

You finally make it to Yellowstone, snap a photo of Old Faithful, and call it a day. But what about the hilarious moment at the diner in Wyoming where the waitress called everyone "honey" and the pie was inexplicably life-changing? Those details fade faster than you'd think.

Bring a small journal and jot down funny quotes, weird signs, and little surprises along the way. Toss a ticket stub or a sugar packet from that diner into a zip-lock bag as a memento. Years from now, those scraps will mean more than any postcard.

You're cruising through the flat, endless stretch of I-40 in New Mexico, the sun is blazing, and suddenly your phone shuffles to a slow jazz ballad. Then another. Then a third. The energy in the car drops like a soufflé. Nobody needs that at mile 200.

A great playlist can carry you through the dull stretches and make the scenic ones feel downright cinematic. Spend an hour before you leave putting one together: upbeat classics, guilty pleasures, a few sing-alongs. And load up a podcast or two for late-night driving or when everyone's talked out.

It's noon, you're on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the views are stunning, but there's not a gas station or restaurant in sight for the next forty miles. Your stomach growls. Your travel companion is eyeing the granola bar you packed "just in case."

A well-stocked cooler is basically a road trip superpower. Cold water, fresh fruit, sandwiches, a few treats; it saves you money, keeps everyone's mood up, and means you never have to settle for a sad vending machine hot dog. Remember: there's no such thing as too many snacks when you're on the road.

You're winding through the gorgeous backroads of Montana, feeling like a true adventurer, when you realize your GPS has been spinning for the last ten minutes. No signal. No map. No idea if you took a wrong turn twelve miles ago.

Before you ever pull out of the driveway, download offline maps for every state you're passing through. Google Maps and apps like Maps.me let you do this for free. It takes five minutes and can save you hours of frustration.

Your buddy volunteered to drive the first leg from Nashville to Memphis, no problem. But then he "just kept going" through Arkansas, and by the time you hit Oklahoma City, his eyes looked like he had been staring at the sun. One close call with a lane change, and suddenly everyone's wide awake… for all the wrong reasons.

Fatigue behind the wheel is genuinely dangerous, and most people overestimate how alert they are. Agree on a schedule before you leave: two hours on, two hours off, or whatever works for your group. Pull over at rest stops, swap drivers, stretch your legs.

It's the Fourth of July weekend, you've just rolled into Gatlinburg after a long day in the Smokies, and every single motel has a "No Vacancy" sign lit up like a Christmas tree. The closest available room is forty-five minutes away and costs twice what it should.

Summer weekends and holiday stretches fill up fast in popular destinations, and last-minute prices can be brutal. A quick fifteen-minute session on a booking site a few weeks out can lock in a good room at a fair price.

You're thirty miles outside of Amarillo when you hear that unmistakable thump-thump-thump. Flat tire. It's 95 degrees out. You pop the trunk expecting a spare and a jack, and find only a reusable grocery bag and someone's old rain jacket.

A basic emergency kit doesn't have to be fancy or expensive. Jumper cables, a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a reflective triangle, a spare tire and jack, and a couple of bottles of water can get you out of most roadside jams. Check that everything's in there before you leave, just in case.

You've planned a scenic morning drive through Shenandoah Valley, but you didn't account for the fact that half of Northern Virginia had the same idea. By 9 a.m., Skyline Drive is bumper-to-bumper, the parking overlooks are packed, and the magic you imagined is buried under brake lights.

Early risers on a road trip get the best of everything: empty roads, golden light, cool air, and all the good parking spots. Set the alarm for 6 a.m., grab your coffee-to-go, and hit the road before the crowds. The views look different at dawn, and there's something wonderfully peaceful about having a stretch of highway all to yourself.

You've done the math: gas, two nights at a motel, a few meals. Tight but doable. Then the tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike hit you out of nowhere, the gas price spikes near the coast, and the car needs an unplanned oil change in Savannah.

Road trips have a way of costing more than you planned, and that's just the nature of the beast. A good rule of thumb is to set aside an extra 20% of your total budget as a cushion for surprises. Call it your "oops fund."

Filming the stars

That wasn't really the Moon: These sci-fi locations are spots on Earth

Desert planets, rainbow skies, double suns... Science fiction films have always promised escape. When we see otherworldly landscapes like those frozen mountains in Interstellar or the endless golden dunes in Star Wars: A New Hope, we imagine that they were fabricated for the movies. But often that's not the case. Here are 10 spots on Earth that, as Hollywood has declared, look like they belong on other planets.

Few places on Earth look as convincingly alien as Death Valley National Park, which is exactly why it doubled as the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977). This George Lucas film used several real locations across Tunisia and the United States to build its now-iconic world.

In Death Valley, filming took place at striking spots like Zabriskie Point and Golden Canyon, pictured above. These scenes appear early in the story, as audiences are introduced to Luke Skywalker’s barren, sun-scorched homeworld.

Interestingly, the production’s impact on the fragile desert ecosystem led the National Park Service to restrict future film shoots, making Star Wars one of the last major productions allowed so much access to it.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick and released in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey opens with the iconic "Dawn of Man" sequence, which shows footage of Monument Valley. These dramatic mesas were already famous from classic Westerns, but this 60s sci-fi movie repurposed them to suggest a prehistoric Earth that set the tone for a film obsessed with the future.

Long before CGI could conjure entire planets, George Lucas found "Tatooine" in the real deserts of Tunisia. The desert world was featured in Star Wars episodes IV, I, and II. The region of Matmata, with its troglodyte dwellings carved directly into the Earth, was built in Phoenician times (around 3000 bC). Their architecture was a clever design to avoid the desert heat.

The region of Tataouine didn’t just provide inspiration for the name of the fictional planet; Nearby desert locations, including salt flats like Chott el Djerid, were used for exterior shots: endless horizons, twin-sun vistas, and the harsh environment that defines Luke’s early life.

It rises abruptly from the plains of Wyoming in a way that has always reminded humans of otherworldly forces. Devils Tower National Monument became one of the most recognizable "alien" landscapes in cinema thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

This 1977 film follows ordinary people drawn to a mysterious location by visions and signals from extraterrestrials. That location is Devil’s Tower. This massive column of igneous rock with vertical lines is central to the story; it is the site where humans and aliens rendezvous. After the film’s release in the late 70s, annual visits to Devil's Tower surged, and its popularity has endured ever since.

The sweeping, untouched wilderness of Fiordland National Park plays a brief but striking role in Alien: Covenant, directed by Ridley Scott. This 2017 film is part of the long-running Alien franchise, and it follows a colony crew that lands on what appears to be a habitable planet, only to discover something far more dangerous there.

These ominous, mist-covered cliffs and deep waters that illustrate the fictional world were filmed with exterior shots in Milford Sound, a fjord in the south of New Zealand. Fiordland is one of the largest national parks in the world, covering over about 4,800 square miles.

It’s easy to imagine another planet looking at such an odd and majestic landscape. These towering sandstone pillars are located in Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, in the northwestern part of central China, and they inspired the Hallelujah Mountains of planet Pandora, featured in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009).

In the movie, very similar mountains were created through CGI to appear like giant floating boulders covered in vegetation. So, the environment was constructed digitally using this real-world setting for inspiration. Following the film’s release and its global impact, one of the park’s pillars, formerly known as Southern Sky Column, was officially renamed "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain."

Released in 1992, Alien 3, directed by David Fincher, continued the story of Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. The film strands her on a bleak prison planet, and for that desolate world, producers turned to a very real and very scarred landscape: Blast Beach, located in the Northeastern England.

The beach appears in exterior sequences depicting the surface of the fictional planet Fiorina 161. Those blackened rocks are the result of decades of waste dumping from nearby coal mines, which left the shoreline covered in slag. Since the 90s, however, Blast Beach has been largely restored through environmental cleanup efforts.

Skellig Michael provides one of the most unforgettable real-world backdrops in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. This 2015 film revived the saga decades after the original trilogy. Towards the film’s final sequence, this island that towers out of the Atlantic Ocean was used to depict, once again, Luke Skywalker’s residence.

This unforgettable backdrop of steep stone steps and ancient monastic structures play the part of planet Ahch-To in the film, where Luke has been living in exile. The same location was revisited in the next movie of the saga. This site is home to a 6th century monastic settlement protected by UNESCO, so filming was tightly controlled, with minimal crews and equipment allowed on the island.

"Starship Troopers" is a 1997 sci-fi action satire. It follows a futuristic military fighting giant alien insects, and it leans heavily on stark, hostile landscapes to sell the idea of distant planets.

One of those landscapes is this rugged badlands area of eroded cliffs, deep ravines, and jugged rock formations, used to represent the planet Klendathu. In the movie, this area looks barren enough, but it turns out to be bug-infested with giant creatures, and epic battles ensue. In real life, Native American tribes used this area to drive bison to their deaths during their hunts.

Few places on Earth have played as many "other planets" as Wadi Rum. These vast, red, towering sandstone cliffs seem to scream "Mars" to a lot of Hollywood producers. For example, in Ridley Scott’s _The Martian (_2015), this desert stood for the surface of Mars. The same desert was later used in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021).

The sense of isolation and lack of vegetation in this scenery is palpable and has inspired many stories of adventure, danger, and survival. The rocks of Wadi Rum have a deep reddish hue due to iron oxide. Its staggering formations make for excellent backdrops, and the sparse population of the area allows filmmakers to shoot wide, uninterrupted vistas.

The 2014 movie Interstellar follows a team of astronauts traveling through the universe in search of a new habitable planet. In their journey, they visit a few. Christopher Nolan’s vision implied filming on location as much as possible. One of the uninhabitable frozen planets was depicted with takes of Svínafellsjökull, a glacier in Europe’s largest ice cap, in Southeastern Iceland.

Meanwhile, not far from there, scenes of a "water planet" were filmed in Iceland’s Mafabot, a lowland between the sea and a river. Also, Dust Bowl inspired scenes of a barren, futuristic Earth were shot in rural areas of Alberta, western Canada.