What Should You Do When Weather Wrecks Your Road Trip Plans?
Now, it makes sense in your head that you think you’re going to be hitting the road in style during a roadtrip. Afterall, most people pick the spring, summer, or early autumn for all of this because that’s usually when there’s good weather. Makes total sense. But of course, maybe the day of the trip, the weather might be nice, but who knows, the next day in the next state, it can be horrible weather. Maybe it could be a storm, a tornado, an unexpected blizzard, well, who knows!
But bad weather, be it rain, fog, well, anything except for sun, just has this way of making the trip less fun, being in the car just more uncomfortable in general. And yeah, it’s frustrating, because road trips are supposed to feel free. But bad weather just sort of limits that feeling here. But how can you pivot in all of this? What can you do? How can you still enjoy the road trip?
Try and Check the Forecast Often
Which is obvious enough here. But getting nitty gritty here, a quick glance at a little icon that says “rain.” It helps to look at timing and intensity. When is the storm supposed to hit? How long is it supposed to last? Is it a steady rain or is it one of those heavy bursts that makes visibility awful? Well, how far in this route is the weather going to be like that? Because sometimes, you can drive through the bad weather pretty fast, especially if you’re on a highway.
But outside of that, though, a destination might look fine, but the route might be the real problem. And if the forecast looks sketchy, the best decision is usually slowing down, changing departure time, or adjusting the route, because arriving later is always better than arriving stressed, or not arriving at all. Thankfully, nowadays, GPSs will at least give more route suggestions if theres bad weather or even wrecks.
Know When to Stop Driving and Call It
Well, obviously, there’s a big difference between “it’s raining” and “this feels unsafe.” It depends on where you’re driving, the area itself, the road conditions (like how much maintenance the road has, if there’s any done at all), lighting, how comfortable you feel, your vision, well, as you can see, the factors could just be listed forever. Plus, you need to think about hydroplaning risk, low visibility, high winds, icy patches, flash flood warnings; those are not the time to push through and prove something. If driving feels tense, that’s usually the cue to stop.
How strict is this schedule that you’re on? Because stopping can mean pulling into a town and getting a hotel, changing the overnight stop, or even hanging out somewhere safe for a few hours until it passes. It’s honestly not too uncommon in low travel seasons to be able to stay at an RV campground if you’re driving an RV; the same can be said for a hotel or motel if you’re driving a car. But don’t fight the weather, you’ll lose. Your safety matters most.
Don’t Bother “Making Up Time”
Why? Well, what if there’s more bad weather? What if you have to speed and risk getting into a car accident? Don’t want either of those scenarios, right? Well, that’s the point, hopefully you’re not on a schedule or anything like that, but especially with bad weather, you absolutely can’t risk getting into this mentality to hurry things up and risk getting into an accident, speeding ticket, or whatever else.