Practical

Twelve things that make a long drive better

July 3, 2026 846 words

What makes a long drive hard is rarely the distance. It is monotony, bad timing and an over-full day. Almost nothing below involves buying anything.

What ruins a long drive is rarely the distance. It is usually the planning: leaving at the wrong hour, stopping in the wrong places, packing the day too full. These twelve have worked again and again.

1. Cap the day at 500 kilometres

Eight hundred is possible. But at the end of that day you will have driven and nothing else — seen nothing, stopped nowhere. Four to five hundred, with breaks and detours, comes to about six hours and leaves you still standing in the evening.

2. Leave early, arrive in daylight

A six in the morning start beats an eight at night start on every measure: no traffic, better light, and you arrive while it is still light. Driving into an unfamiliar city in the dark is the most tiring part of any journey.

3. Stop every two hours, even if you feel fine

A break is not for curing tiredness, it is for delaying it. A break taken after you are already tired wears off much faster. Fifteen minutes, out of the car, a few steps, is enough.

4. Leave the motorway once a day

Take at least one detour off the main road every day. Twenty kilometres of a minor road usually turns out to be the part of the day you remember. The motorway moves you fast and shows you nothing.

5. Refuel at half a tank

Do not wait for a quarter. In mountain and rural areas stations are far apart and some close early. Once refuelling at half becomes a habit you never think about it again.

6. Download the maps offline

Coverage drops out more often than people expect — in valleys, tunnels and mountain passes. Downloading the region takes five minutes, and the first time it saves you, you start doing it for every trip.

7. Put something in the middle of the day

A stop that splits a long day in two makes it psychologically shorter. A ruin, a lake, a restaurant somebody recommended. “There by lunch” is much easier to hold in your head than “six hundred kilometres by evening”.

8. Sort the music before you go

Streaming stops where coverage does. A few hours downloaded beats silence in the middle of a mountain road. Podcasts work better than music on long flat stretches, where the problem is attention rather than boredom.

9. Water and snacks, not from the services

Everything bought on the road is expensive and bad. One supermarket stop before you leave changes the whole trip. Nuts, fruit, more water than you think. Sugar gives you twenty minutes and then makes you sleepy.

10. If you share the driving, share it in short shifts

Rather than four hours on and four hours off, swap every two. Nobody gets too tired, and both of you actually see the whole route.

11. Book a night ahead

Going completely unplanned is romantic and does not work in season. Booking one day ahead keeps the flexibility without leaving you hunting for a room at nine at night. Small guesthouses in small towns are usually both cheaper and better.

12. Keep the record of the road

I left this last, and it is the one people regret. Your phone is already recording — if Google Maps Timeline is on, everywhere you went is in the file. But that file now lives only on the phone, and on some accounts it deletes itself every three months.

Spend five minutes when you get home and export your location history. A year later, watching that trip play across a map — where you went, how far each day actually was — brings back far more than the photographs do.

And one item that is not on the list

There is no gear on this list, because most of it is unnecessary. A charging cable, a phone mount and enough water is close to the whole equipment requirement of a long drive. The rest is how you drive it.

The ten-minute check before you leave

A few things worth doing before setting off, ten minutes in total: check tyre pressures (it matters on a loaded car), top up the screen wash, confirm the spare and the jack are where they should be, and have your documents with you.

It sounds dull, but those four cover most of what actually goes wrong on a long drive. The rest is what breakdown cover is for.

The first sign of fatigue is not feeling sleepy

Feeling sleepy is a late signal. The earlier ones: your following distance shrinking without you noticing, not remembering the last five kilometres, making small corrections within your lane.

When one of those appears, stop. A fifteen-minute break buys back more time than an hour of driving, because tired driving is slow driving.

If you are driving alone

A long drive alone is more tiring than the same drive with company — there is nobody to talk to and breaks get cut short. Solo, take breaks more often and keep them longer, and hold the day under four hundred kilometres.