St. Paul, MN To Denver, CO

[zerby]

Hi,

When would be a good time to start our Road Trip???


Thank You.

Zerby (Brand New Member)

[glc]

Welcome!

Can you please clarify your question? ANY time can be a good time to start a road trip.

[zerby]

When would a good time in the morning to start?? (7am??)

[AZBuck]

One of the abiding rules in RoadTripping is that there is no single 'best' answer to any question, about route, about sites to see, about how long to drive on a given day, about whether to book ahead or find accommodations as you go, about anything - even what time of day to start. I actually started many of my own RoadTrips at 11:00 pm when I used to work the night shift, because the hours of 0-dark-thirty were my normal awake hours and driving through the first night allowed me to cover ground that I had seen often while there was practically no traffic on the roads.

In you're case, you're leaving from a major metropolitan area and you'd have to traverse Minneapolis, Bloomington, and Shakopee before you hit truly open road. To cover all that ground before the start of a possible rush hour, you'd probably have to leave earlier than 7:00 am. But you have to balance that against the fact that most morning rush hour traffic would be headed in the opposite direction so that your lanes might be relatively traffic free (You know far more about the Twin Cities' traffic than I do), or even the fact that you might be leaving on a weekend (about which I know nothing) when there might not even be a rush hour.

If you're worried about how far down the road you might get before having to stop, that really doesn't depend on when you leave, only on how long you're on the road. No matter how early or late you leave, if you're well rested at the start of your drive, you should expect to cover around 550 miles. Leaving earlier won't help - you'll just hit your physical limits earlier in the day but at the same spot in the road, roughly Kearney NE.

AZBuck

[zerby]

It's a Friday that we're planning on.

[Southwest Dave]

What are your plans for this roadtrip ? Is it just to get to Denver as quickly as possible or are you planning on sight seeing and taking detours along the way ? How long do you have ? Going direct will mean an overnight stop along the way, as Buck mentioned, you shouldn't plan on covering much more than 550 miles in a day.

Once you have figured out how far you want to get on the first day and what you might want to do along the way will help determine the best time to hit the road.

[zerby]

Yes. We will stop for Breakfast. There will be an overnight stop in (Think Don't quote me) Omaha, Nebraska. I'm just the passenger. My Brother's doing the driving.

[Midwest Michael]

Lincoln will be closer to halfway, if you're looking to cut this into 2 equal length days. It would mean 7-8 hours on the road each day.

[DonnaR57]

My husband and I love to start our road trips at 5 or 6 in the morning, drive a couple of hours, and then stop for breakfast. Then we are off the road between 2 pm and 4 pm, which is earlier than many other people. This gives us plenty of time to find a hotel, have a swim, take a shower and then go to dinner while others are just making their way off the road. But this works for us -- other people have their own methods. If we're on a speed run, we do the same thing on the 2nd and 3rd days of our trip, if needed.

Sometimes, the breakfast stop has a two-fold purpose: it feeds our bodies while we wait for the rush hour traffic to die down, if we are headed into a city at the wrong time. This always happens to us when we leave a place that is 2 hours from the next city. Stop for breakfast about 7:30 am and let the traffic crawl on by. By the time we're done eating, rush hour is about done.


Donna

[zerby]

That sounds good Donna. I'll leave it up to my Brother. He lives in Denver but he's flying out here. Because our late Father's house sold. He'll be in town for the closing. He's renting a you Haul truck for the way back.