Road trip to Las Vegas from Virginia

[Monamig2017]

Hi! We are planning to go to Las Vegas from Virginia by car in July. We are 5 people with 2 adults, 3 kids and 1 dog. We are planning to stay over at a hotel for one night in the middle of our journey. Google is showing me three routes by which I can travel on, I wanted to know which route would be the safest to travel trough with kids at night and would be the safest to stay the night for. Which states are safe and which states aren’t? Please let me know, thanks!

[Mark Sedenquist]

Hi! We are planning to go to Las Vegas from Virginia by car in July.

Welcome to the Trip Advice Forums.

There is no safe route to go from Virginia to Las Vegas with one (1) overnight stop! Four days driving is the absolute minimum required to cover this distance safely and that's stretching it. We recommend that you take a full five days to travel that distance.

Mark

[DonnaR57]

Mark is right - this is definitely not something to do with one overnight. It's about 2250 miles, figured from Roanoke, VA, which is at least 4 days of driving. (Depends on where you start from, so it may be more mileage than that.) I'd get to I-81 and take that south to I-40, then US-93 up to Las Vegas.

I wouldn't trust Google Maps for travel times. We take their distance and divide it by 50 to come up with a better travel time estimate. Mr. Google does not take into consideration traffic snarl ups, slow moving traffic (it can't predict that this far ahead), how many trips to the fuel-station, rest room facilities and restaurants your group will take. It just predicts based on you maintaining full speed limit at every minute of the day. Impossible! In the 16 hours that Google tells you that you can make in one day, you will be lucky to make 750 or 800 miles -- that is still only a third of the trip. Would your kids like to be strapped into a vehicle for that long??? Probably not.

If you absolutely need to get to the destination in two days, FLY.


Donna

[Southwest Dave]

Please do not even attempt this, no route would be safe doing so!! It would be an impossible task with 3 experienced adults swapping shifts but with kids and pets it would also be cruel. In the real world you would need a perfect day on the road to average 60mph when you consider construction and congestion delays, bathroom breaks, rest stops, food, re-fuelling and getting out to stretch those tired aching limbs. Thats a minimum 10 hours on the road per day over 4 days, add an hour to get ready and have breakfast each morning and 2 hours to find a Motel, check in, get an evening meal and unwind and thats a 13 hour day, if all goes well!! To do this safely and arrive with your sanity in tact you will need at least 3 overnight stops and even then I doubt the kids will enjoy being couped up in a tin can for hours on end.

[noFanofCB]

This probably couldn't even be safely done in a single-engine propellor airplane.

[travelingman]

“ This probably couldn't even be safely done in a single-engine propellor airplane.”

And that’s not a joke! Makes you think …