From 5 Years To 8 – Our Road Trip Is Getting Longer

When we set off on our road trip on January 1, 2018, our plan was to spend five years visiting all 50 states. That would give us an average of five weeks per state, spending more time in larger states and less time in smaller states.

We’re just about to complete our fourth year on the road trip which in theory means we should only have one year left. There’s a teensie problem with that though – we’ve only completed 24 states so far!

Shae and I sat down recently and roughly planned out the rest of our road trip and came to the realization that we’re going to need to extend our road trip from five years to eight.

There are a few reasons our road trip is taking longer than we’d originally anticipated:

1) COVID

When COVID started affecting life in the US in March 2020, we slowed our road trip right down. We went from moving every 5-7 days to staying in the same place for 3-6 weeks at a time.

Shae, Truffles and I weren’t sure how long the pandemic would last, so we slowly made our way back across the country to be near family on the east coast. Most of the places we stayed along the way were states we’d already visited which meant from April 2020 to the end of that year we only picked up one new state – Maryland. We’ve maintained a slow travel pace in 2021 and so only picked up four new states this year.

2) International Travel

Although COVID has impacted how much we’re willing and able to travel internationally right now, we like to travel overseas for 2-4 weeks per year. When starting the road trip we didn’t build that into our plans; as a result, we hadn’t accounted for the fact that international travel would eliminate 2.5-5 months of time during the five years of our road trip.

3) Spending Longer In Some States

As mentioned earlier, we’d planned to spend an average of five weeks in each state. However, there have been some states where we’ve spent longer than that in them even though they weren’t particularly large like New Mexico. Don’t get me wrong – I have no regrets about spending more than five weeks in New Mexico as it’s amazing and has been my favorite state so far, but more time in all these states means more time on the road trip as a whole.

4) GC Galore

At the end of 2018 I set up a new website called GC Galore which covers all the gift card deals that are out there. At the time I didn’t anticipate spending more than an hour on it per day.

That was a major underestimate.

It’s taken up far more of my time than that, but thankfully it’s becoming quite successful and so has been worth it. November and December are particularly busy, so from mid-November to mid-December we’ve started staying in the same place for an entire month so that I can focus on working on that site while having a little bit of time to explore whatever area we’re in. In 2020 that was Ocean City, while in 2021 it was Portland.

Spending four weeks in the same place when we’d normally only spend five weeks in the entire state as a whole is another reason we’re not on track to complete our road trip in five years.

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Those are the main reasons we’re having to extend our road trip, but that’s not the only major change we decided to make recently. We’re making another big change for the second half of our 50 state road trip, so stay tuned for more news about that in the next couple of days.