I’m contemplating driving from LA to Phoenix for the weekend. I’m not getting any time off, except for a very vague possibility of being able to leave mid-afternoon on Friday. Otherwise, it’s leaving during rush-hour traffic on Friday evening, or going very, very early Saturday morning, attending a couple of events during the day and evening on Saturday, and then driving back home on Sunday. I’m thinking that even though the Saturday events would be a lot of fun for me, I might be just a little bit crazy to do that much driving for such a short time, and still trying to bring some energy to work on Monday.
For reference, Phoenix is about 400 miles from my house, so Google estimates about 5.5 hours going from home without traffic (that’s the Saturday morning scenario). Leaving from work on Friday evening cuts about 25 miles off the trip, but is likely to increase travel time by an hour or more due to traffic.
So, what are the longest driving trips you’ve taken over the course of a standard weekend? How far would you be willing to go in this limited amount of time, assuming you had to return to work/school/whatever obligation bright and early Monday morning?
A friend and I did an eight hour trip once for a party, from Baltimore to Cincinnati and back in less than two days. Of course I was much younger then and had a co-driver.
Maybe 3 hours, if I had a car. I recently took a 7-hour flight for a weekend, but I made it a 5-day weekend. I guess the longest that I have ever done is a 6-hour bus trip for a 3-day weekend. Not sure I’d do that again.
ShibbOleth makes a point. My wife will be coming with me, so I would definitely have another driver in an emergency. However, we are very compatible in that I pretty much always like driving, and she pretty much always prefers me driving, so I wouldn’t be turning to her unless I were actually falling asleep on the road. I don’t think the drive itself would be killer while it was happening. I just think I might get home and be completely drained afterward.
Rhiannon8404, how have you felt after making that long-haul? Were you completely functional the next day?
For a purely recreational trip, I have gone 4-5 hours. For family occasion/obligation type things I think I have gone up to like 9, but wasn’t very happy about it.
I’m going to take an opportunity to plug my own wife, here. We had been dating long-distance at the time, and I wound up on a business trip that put me roughly on her side of the country. When we found out that I was going to have that Sunday free, she left her home at 4:30pm on a Saturday afternoon (on less than an hour’s notice!), got to me at midnight, and then turned around and drove back home at 7am on Monday morning.
I would have been stupid not to marry this woman for many reasons, but that trek of hers will always stand out in my mind.
Yeah, for the most part. Monday morning reaction is usually that we are tired, but it was worth it. I should explain that by “numerous” I mean we’ve done it about a dozen times in the last 20 yrs or so. Not like once a month or anything.
Back when I was is a long distance relationship, I’d do the 12 hour drive for Friday-Sunday. Leave at lunch on Friday, get home at oh, like 3 am on monday morning.
Now I won’t do more than 4 hours-went to D.C. for a weekend baseball series.
The longest was 660 miles one way leaving on a Friday and coming back on Sunday for a total of 1350 miles. My daughter was away at college and got sick. She’d passed a kidney stone by time I arrived.
I’ve ridden a bicycle over 200 miles on a weekend a few times including 228 miles in one day.
I’ve done a same-day trip with four hours of driving in the morning and four hours of driving in the evening. For an overnight trip, I’d probably be willing to stretch that to a pair of 6 hour drives.
According to google maps, it seems the farthest I’ve gone was ~8 hours each way (including a ferry ride) from Seattle to Tofino and back. It didn’t seem that far when I was driving.
I was younger. Gas was cheaper.
I’d still probably do it again if I could leave work a little early on Friday.
Now, if the goal was to spend time in the destination city, probably 3-4 hours. If the goal was to drive around and see things, 6-8 hours traveling/day seems about right. LA-Phoenix is a little bit far, but still very reasonable. LA-Albuquerque is ridiculous.
In this particular case, there are two baseball games happening that day (one at 1pm, another at 7pm). My wife and I are huge baseball fans. So we’d be driving to one game, then probably eating (or visiting with some friends who live in town), then driving to another game, then the hotel, then leaving the following day.
I just wish that Phoenix was a little bit closer to LA.
I’ve done a couple weekends in Chicago which is about 6.5 hours away. We’re heading up to Grand Marais which is almost 4.5 hours away in 10 days and taking the dogs with too.
I regularly drove from Minneapolis to Chicago when I was in grad school, about every other weekend, to see my now-husband. If memory serves, that was around 6 hours each way. So I guess it depends on how much you want to go there.
The longest one-way distance I have driven for a weekend trip is about 75 miles, to attend a gaming convention. However, I did manage to drive 200 miles in one day; I drove 100 miles round trip to pick up a new computer…and then another 100 miles to pick up the keyboard that they did not include the first time.