Plan a 3-day road trip in one email
Tell Mabel where you're going, who's in the car, and what you like. Get back a day-by-day route with drive times, stops, and linked places.
Road trip planning has a way of expanding to fill every evening of the week before the trip. One tab for the route, one for "best stops between Portland and Bend," one for a diner a blog swore by in 2019, a notes file titled "TRIP" that you'll never open again, and a growing suspicion that you're spending more time planning the drive than the drive will take.
Here's the one-email version.
What to send
Email [email protected] with the shape of the trip and the truth about your crew:
"Three days, Denver to Santa Fe and back, leaving Friday morning July 31. Two adults, kids 4 and 8. The kids max out around 2.5 hours in the car before things deteriorate. We like weird roadside stuff, short easy hikes, and good green chile. One night in Santa Fe, one somewhere on the way back. Not big museum people."
The honest details are the load-bearing ones. "Kids melt down at 2.5 hours" shapes the whole route; "scenic" shapes nothing.
What comes back
A day-by-day plan in one reply, with real drive times between legs and a Google Maps link for every stop:
Day 1: Denver to Santa Fe (about 6 hours driving, split into three legs) Leave by 8. First leg, 2 hours to the Royal Gorge Bridge (map): walk the bridge, let the kids run, easy bathrooms. Second leg, 2 hours to Great Sand Dunes (map): an hour of sand-sledding counts as the day's hike. Final leg, 2.5 hours into Santa Fe; dinner at The Shed (map) for the green chile, kid-tolerant before 6:30.
Day 2: Santa Fe...
And so on, with the back-of-the-envelope honesty you want from a friend who's done the drive: which leg is the boring one, where the last good gas stop is, which stop to cut if you're running behind. Where something is seasonal or has odd hours, she checks current sources and links you to the real site rather than guessing from an old blog post.
Then it's a conversation, not a document. Reply "day 2 looks too packed, and swap the second hike for a pool" and the plan comes back revised. When it's settled, ask for calendar invites for the anchor points, like hotel check-ins and that 6:30 dinner, and you'll get .ics files to drop into the family calendar.
Pro tip
State your non-negotiables and your one indulgence. "We will not do more than three hours in a car after lunch" and "I want one genuinely great dinner even if the kids eat chicken fingers" give the plan a spine. The vaguer the request, the more generic the itinerary; the more it sounds like your actual family, the more the trip will too.