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This road trip tips for safe travels post is sponsored by Best Buy. We have been compensated in the form of a Best Buy gift card and/or received a product/service at a discount of for free. Geek Daddy and I are headed to North Carolina tomorrow morning after dropping the boys off to school and Kaylee to my Mom's house. A kid free weekend away- I can't describe how much this couple's getaway is needed right now. We will be spending a long weekend in the Wilmington & Carolina Beach area until Monday. There was a lot to get done before we hit the road in the morning. No matter if you are a road trip pro or a travel newbie, these tips will help make your next road trip an easy ride.

Road Trip Tips

Know your timing. Google Maps is great for road trips. Days of the paper book atlas seem to be a thing of the past. Now everything is electronic. Make sure you have your road trip route mapped out from point A to point B but leave yourself some wiggle room for making pit stops. I've found that the random side of the road stops to hole in the wall restaurants offer some of the best food.

Make sure your car is in tip top road trip running order. Car maintenance is important even if you aren't taking long road trips a lot. Make sure you have a full tank of gas and keep an eye on gas tank gauge so you aren't on the side of the road sitting on E. You'll also want to check the fluids and tire pressure before you leave the driveway. I also do a check of headlights, brake lights, and if the kids are with us I make sure the child safety lock is on the doors.

Since Geek Daddy has a tendency to have a bit of a lead foot another good thing to have for our car is the new Uniden R7 Radar Detector which can help monitor speeds with voice notification and max speed warning system. With the Uniden R7 you'll be able to monitor safe speeds without even taking your eyes off of the roads. This radar detector works with most car models and can get real time alerts. To me that's a good way to ensure that Mr Lead Foot isn't speeding down the roadways while I listen to some music.

Music is my next tip. I'm curious, on road trips who controls the radio? The driver or the front seat passenger on your road trips? For us it's usually me when he is driving but we have a mutual taste in music genres so I mix it up like a recorded off the radio mixed tape from the 90's. We will be in the car for about 4 hours tomorrow morning so I have the radio set as well as some XM channels that I enjoy ready to go.

Something I learned the hard way about having for road trips is road side assistance. I was 4 hours from home on a work trip last year and my headlights were left on overnight while I was at the hotel so when I got up to head to training my battery was as dead as could be. No turn over or anything. It took my car insurance company 2 hours to get someone over to me. I called after trying to do an app request to only discover that my vehicle wasn't listed for road side assistance, only Geek Daddy's car was. I quickly updated that error and was on my way to work.

I hope these few road trip tips help you reach your next destination on time and in the right place even if the right place was a spur of the moment pit stop along the way.