Welcome to RTA!

When traveling in the winter months anywhere in the USA, it's best to check the weather before leaving and then again along the way. It's also good to have an extra day or so built into the schedule, in case the weather gets bad and he needs to pull into a motel and hole up for a day until the weather gets better.

The issue between I-80 and I-90 is elevation. I-80 goes into higher elevations, making bad weather more likely. However, I-90 sees its share of snowy weather. My husband, a former commercial driver, has been holed up in a truck stop along each of those routes at one time or another! He could wait to decide until just before he has to make the choice.

Since your husband is driving alone, if he is driving a car, he could do 500-600 miles a day, which would translate to 8-11 hours on the road. If driving a U-Haul or similar (as my husband has ALSO done), he probably won't want to do that many miles in a day.

What I did for my husband, before he left, was to research his overnight stops as well as I could ahead of time. Then I downloaded coupons (hotelcoupons.com) for likely looking motel properties in each possible overnight. Because he was driving a U-Haul truck that needed a larger fuel-up area, I sent him places where he could find Love's and Flying J truck stops, though I encouraged him to watch highway billboards for truck stops that advertised their unleaded fuel prices. One bummer to traveling alone is that there's no co-driver to sit there and look at Gasbuddy.com app while driving, or checking the GPS.

Is your husband flying back? Mine flew one direction and drove back in the U-Haul going the other direction.


Donna