there's just something about a good road trip isn't there you have the wide open road
to yourself and that feeling of a total sense of freedom i love me a good road trip if you are new
to my channel my name is jeanie i live in colorado and i share all sorts of colorado outdoors from
hiking suv camping road trips traveling day in life colorado living all that fun stuff so if
you're interested be sure to subscribe and follow along my husband and i have been taking a road
trip since 2006. i probably just aged myself right there from a little weekend john's to multi-state
road trips we have quite a few miles under a belt and many more miles to be had but having all those
road trips under our belt has allowed us to really dial in and know exactly what essentials we need
to bring with us on our road trip to make it fun comfortable exciting and all the necessities and
that's exactly what today's vlog is i am sharing our top 16 road trip essentials so if you have the
edge to hit the road i hope you find this vlog helpful as i share all my road trip essentials
so one investment we made in our road trips is getting a dash cam and we feel so much better
having a dash cam in our car knowing if there's any sort of accident that were to take place knock
on wood we've never gotten in an accident ever fingers crossed that continues but we feel better
having this camera set up while we're driving so if something were to happen or take place
we have evidence of what took place whether it was our fault or someone else's fault at least this
will help clear up any accusations or he said she said hit and run situations and it can even help
in court if it weren't to ever get to something like that there is a huge market of dash cams out
there we have the garmin mini 2 what we love about this one is the size of it it's so small and you
don't even notice it up on your windshield and it connects directly to your phone with bluetooth it
has a tiny 1080p camera with 140 degree lens for us for road trips this little garmin is perfect
the nice thing about road trips is the flexibility you get even though i'm one that really likes to
hone in and plan out most of our road trips so we kind of have a sense of what we'll be doing
each day there's been many times where we've ended up having to switch up our road trip either it had
to do with weather trail heads closures all those things there's been many times where we've had to
cancel our plans for that day and go to something else so no matter where we're going we always
bring our annual national park pass with us even if we didn't have any intentions of going to a
national park site because like what i just said if we did have to change something up we still
have access to national parks if we decided to go to a national park in the vicinity of where we're
road tripping so no matter what any type of passes we have are always in our car for every road trip
next up is our utensil tote which is this right here so we actually made one of these totes for
camping however we love having this available and all the essentials in it that now we have it for
all our road trips as well so basically what we use this tote form is an area to store all our
like kitchen gear towels all the things because what we really enjoy doing is having like picnics
or doing quick stops on the side at like a rest area to maybe have a sandwich or some type of you
know meal instead of having to go out to eat so having this tote with all the things we need is
perfect so for this tote we went out and bought new utensils and things that we knew we'd want
to bring with us for specifically camping and road tripping because i don't know about you but
i hate having to dig through my entire kitchen and pull out all the things from my kitchen to
pack for road trips or camping and hope i don't miss anything as well i know that this is just
for road tripping and camping so we just went and bought some cheap utensils from like walmart and
target it just makes life easier that's why we have this tote for all that so let me show you
what we got here so normally the toad has a lot more things in it for camping like we'll
have pots and pans our coffee maker all these things but for road tripping we usually don't
bring those items with us we just got some paper towels some different washcloths and other towels
that we use if we needed to actually wash our hands with soap and water pure castile soap is
our favorite soap to have it's just a little travel size container and then we have some
plate bowls or whatever you want to call these highly recommend these type um because then it
kind of cuts down on all the things you need you don't need to buy a plate and a bowl this is kind
of like the same thing and then sometimes if we have like orange juice or something with we just
have some of our mugs of course we have a cutting board with and then down here are all our utensils
spoons forks uh knives scissors and then we just bought these like separators on here to kind of
keep everything organized we have a random hammer you never know when you need a hammer and then
underneath we have some zip lock and garbage bags that we just store in here in case we need them
and then just some random things we have like a deck of cards a lighter
this is another extra light and then in this little pouch are these mini size salt
and pepper shakers that we absolutely love they're perfect for camping road tripping
um they're just small and they have the grinder on them so highly recommend so this is our catch-all
tote for all these smaller items and it really helps keep us organized while we're on the road
we know where everything is it's going to be in this tote whether it's a mess or not it's
really nice to have this separate tote to have all these essentials
it's so important to stay hydrated when you're traveling and having water within easy reach
is also important that's why we actually prefer having these types of water bottles
for road trips it's a covered insulated water bottle with a straw it makes it so much easier
when you're driving to just grab your water bottle and take a sip of water through a straw
rather than a bottle that we have to take the cap off or flip open a cap or something because it's
reusable we always have extra water jugs available so we could just grab this out of our cooler and
fill this as needed cycling through plastic water bottles is something we try not to do
so if we can fill this up at hotels or gas stations or something while we're on the road and
just keep filling up our water bottle they work hand in hand and they're perfect for road trips
i'm all about staying organized while we're road tripping and that includes all our snacks so we
have a snack tote that we bring with and this little toad here stores all our non-perishable
snacks for road tripping i'm not going to go into detail of all the different snacks and
stuff we bring with however i do have a different vlog on all the different road trips snacks and
meals that we do bring with us so if you're interested in seeing kind of more ideas for
food on the road um definitely go check out that blog lots of really good ideas in there
another thing i really like to kind of contain while we're road dripping is all the trash
so whether it's orange peels banana peels and wrappers pop cans or whatever it is we like to
have a trash can available in our car so we can keep everything contained this is a tiny little
road tripping trash can that you can just hang from the back of a seat and it's small completely
waterproof and it's perfect storage for your trash until you get to a gas station or something in
order to empty this so highly recommend getting yourself a little trash can for your road trip
and next up is our cooler and what's a road trip without a cooler right i feel like i don't have
to go into much detail about a cooler because obviously this is your storage for all things
that are perishable and keep drinks and everything cool however there is one thing i want to mention
about purchasing a cooler we've had this yeti for many years yeti i kind of started these types of
coolers and then now every other brand and their mother make these types of coolers so we upgraded
our cooler from like a standard coleman cooler and we could not believe the difference in the
insulation of this cooler compared to our coleman usually with our coleman our ice was completely
melted by the end of the day and with this yeti we still have ice until like the next day so
investing in a good cooler is very very important there's so many coolers like this on the market
now um so i can only talk about what we currently have which is this yeti and we truly love it now
just one other thing i really want to point out when you're selecting a good road tripping cooler
is make sure that your cooler has a hole where you can drain the water that's really really
important so we can always drain the water from the cooler without having to take on all our items
then another thing we really like about our yeti is that it comes with this storage basket on top
so normally how we set this up is you know we put all our drinks meats all the items we really need
to keep really cold then in our basket we put items it might get damaged easier in a cooler
so we might put like sliced cheese some lettuce um things like that in this basket so it still stays
cold but it's not like down packed under the ice and also fyi this cooler is 100 bear resistant and
there's holes on each corner of the cooler where you can put locks to make it even more secure
one thing we've really enjoyed having on a road trip is having some chairs with us these
are small little collapsible camping chairs there's been many times during our road trip
if we're looking to kind of pull over and take a break but we are tired of sitting in our vehicle
we just set up these little chairs maybe have some specific lookout area or wherever we are
and just kind of sit down and enjoy a little break in these chairs or enjoyed some type of
meal outside of our vehicle and these have been really nice to do that since they're
small and compact they don't take up a lot of room so highly recommend these for road trips
let's talk about our center console area where you kind of throw all the little things
to bring with you um whenever you're traveling and we're going to go directly to our jeep and
i'll show you exactly what we got in there all right welcome to our jeep this is our
center console has two different layers on it so this first top layer we have kind of the
smaller items i like having this small bottle of hand sanitizer eye drops are really great
to have from the ac and the heat and everything blowing on your eyes they can definitely dry out
we just have some flossers with this container is just filled with some ibuprofen fingernail
clipper and a pen open up the bottom portion and here we have kleenex extra sunglasses with
a case so they don't get scratched this is just a microfiber cloth for our sunglasses to clean it of
course additional masks in case we need it we have this small little flashlight some more pencils and
pens we have some band-aids readily available and ladies it's always good to have some of
these available if needed and of course we always have a car charger plug available for our phones
always consider seasonal items as well the climate of where you're road tripping to could be totally
different than where you are we always like having an umbrella we normally always will have a snow
scraper and brush in our vehicle having sun shades for your window are good to have maybe
packing like a rain jacket or things like that think of the seasonal items that you might need
next up is a blanket i don't know about you but my husband and i tend to have different
body temperatures at times he might be super hot and i'm sitting in my corner freezing
even though we might have dual thermostats it still can sometimes be tricky getting that
perfect temperature so having a blanket is really nice to just throw over your
legs or take a little cat nap so highly recommend having one of these available
before you leave home on your road trip always make sure you have everything downloaded and ready
on your phone so downloading programs on the road can take a lot of data some of my favorite road
tripping apps are google maps for navigation gas buddies awesome to see where the next gas station
is and where you can get the cheapest gas and i love tripadvisor to kind of get reviews and
feedback on different restaurants activities and whatnot for the area we're going and if you're
one who loves to listen to podcasts or specific music you're wanting to download get all of that
taken care of and downloaded before you leave one thing we have really learned over the years is to
have a variety of money options available while it is 2022 most places nowadays do take a credit
card however there are some places off the beaten path or in smaller towns that do not accept credit
cards and they only accept cash so always make sure to have some type of cash on you just in case
you end up at an area where credit cards aren't accepted and you do need to pay cash for whatever
it is you need many times we've seen like little coffee shops or food trucks where they say cash
only and there's been times we went to restaurants and their credit card machine wasn't working when
we went to go check out so we ended up having to pay cash so just keep those things in mind
and another thing is parking always make sure to have quarters and change on you as well sometimes
if you have to pay for parking the machine doesn't accept credit cards and you need to have quarters
or bills available and if you are using a credit card be sure that you have a travel pass or travel
notification on your credit card so that your bank knows that you are traveling so that when you're
in a different destination out of the ordinary they don't block the transaction and there you are
standing not being able to use your card that can be embarrassing if you can't get your card to work
while you're road tripping you get exposed to many different things that can happen
and it's always good to come prepared with a first aid kit maybe you're getting out of your vehicle
heading to a bathroom and you slip and fall and skin up your knees or if you get a bug bite or you
end up touching something that's really hot and you burn yourself it's really good to have a first
aid kit and make sure it consists of every size of band-aid from itty bitty to big you never know
what size you're going to need it has gauze it has tape different ointments cool packs it kind of has
a little bit everything in there in case there is something that might happen to you on your road
trip and you need some first day i feel like this is something you should have no matter if you're
road tripping or not and it's pretty basic but i figured i'd better cover it always make sure
you have your driver's license your insurance registration and any phone numbers to any type of
aaa roadside service that you might have we like keeping all these items together and storing it
all right in our glove box so it's obvious and you should already have these but here's your reminder
and last but not least are those items you might need for some vehicle maintenance so always make
sure you have a spare tire and tools also make sure to have a tire pressure gauge now i know
most vehicles they have the sensors where you can look up the tire pressure on your vehicle
however those sensors can break and go out so they are accurate until they break its technology
it's not going to be perfect and always work so actually owning a tire pressure gauge is
very very important they're small just keep it in your glove box it allows you to quickly and
accurately check your tire pressure and one last thing that makes this really comfortable
knowing we have with us on road trips is having this all-in-one jumpstart and air compressor
unit something were to happen on the road and there's nobody around we are able to jump start
our vehicle and use the air compressor on our own we don't need to rely on someone else to come help
us so highly recommend investing in something like this all right you guys and that is it these are
my top 16 road trip essentials a little bit of planning and preparation can go a long way to
set you up for a good road trip so i hope these tips help and give you some good ideas of what
you should bring on your next road trip i will leave all the links below down in the description
of all the items i talked about now all you have to do is let your road trip and adventure unfold
have an amazing road trip wherever you are headed and we'll see you guys in my next vlog bye guys