daily driving limits

[jasin1]

left Florida Georgia line yesterday about 9:30 am …had a site booked in Lumberton NC for the night…..decided to change it to a campsite farther up in NC to be a little closer to home for a easier 2nd day drive. Then i started thinking…well if i’m only 4 1/2 hours from home maybe i can just keep driving and be home the same day??….seemed like a great idea and i felt really good at 4:00 so i pushed on….not a good decision. I made it home at 10 pm…the last two hours were driving in rain and traffic and had to back the fifth wheel in at night…exhausted and irritable.

I could have stopped driving at 4:00 and had a nice leisurely evening with a walk around the campground with my wife…We would have enjoyed a good dinner and some local news on the tv…turn in early and wake refreshed for a easy drive home……but i got greedy and wanted to get home a day early and instead had a long grueling day of driving yesterday without enough water and good food…didn’t sleep very good because of the white knuckle driving around DC in the rain at night ….woke today feeling like i’m jet lagged or hungover and will probably lose this “extra day i gained” to taking a nap and recovering. I used to drive straight thru to the keys when i was younger but those days are over for me now…5 or 6 hours max is my limit going forward

The moral of this post is don’t push it…you gain very little by doubling your daily driving and will pay for it the next day

 

[NH_Bulldog]

I agree with you 100% We have pushed things ourselves and ended up regretting it. While we might have gotten to our destination quicker, the time spent in "recovery" negated any perceived gain in time. We use the RV Life Trip Planner and set our daily maximum driving time to no more than 6 hours. We have found that stopping for fuel, bathroom breaks, lunch, etc. adds more than we anticipated, and traffic is out of our control, so we try to stick to a limit. The worse case is that we have more time to relax and enjoy happy hours (yes, happy hours, why limit it to just 60 minutes)? A nice drink on the rocks and a fine cigar and who cares where I could have been if I traveled another couple of hours?

 

[flybouy]

Yup, learned that lesson years ago. One of the best advantages of retirement IMO is not being pressed for time. The days of getting to a cg on a Friday and setting up in the dark and battling Sunday traffic to get home are long over for us.

It's like adapting to getting down on your knees and back up again. The older you get the longer it takes and the longer you feel the effects. With age you begine to "think ahead & plan accomondations" for getting down, no different for planing travel IMO.

When it comes to D.C. traffic I avoid it if at all possible. I've worked in and around the district for several decades so I'm familiar with the traffic patterne. The #1 issue is that just about anything can cause hours of delay regardless of the time of day. There's a reason that there's federal regulations on max hours for commercially driving a truck, piloting a boat, or flying an airplane. The limits were determined by a lot of data and the periods of rest should be extended according to age IMO.

 

[Eman85]

I'm a slow learner when it comes to pushing it driving, years of OTR trucking. For me as long as they still sell coffee on the road there's no limits.

 

[sourdough]

It took me a bit to get out of the "gotta get there TODAY" mentality. Like you found, pushing it ruins the next day once to the destination so just take your time as you noted. Heck, we take 4 days to get to FL and I still need a day or two to recoup once there. Something about retirement....or maybe it's age???, requires us to have a catch up day or two at the end of a trip. Definitely not worth it to push it.

Always stay in Vicksburg MS going to FL and it started out as a one nighter years ago. Now we stay at least 2 nights, and have stayed 7 in the past, to just decompress, kick back and enjoy the sights and history around there. As dw has pointed out - why do I need to rush through places never seeing anything to get to a place I'm going to spend 5 or 6 months?? Doesn't make sense. Anyway, just take the time, enjoy each stop, set a very comfortable (probably slow) pace and try to feel good each morning.

 

[Notanlines]

While I do understand Eman’s mentality, we have all been there once upon a time, we now take a two day stop in New Orleans on the way home just to eat! One should never be too busy to stop at Mother’s on Poydras!

 

[Peto]

4 hours is my target, 6 hours is my max.

 

[jasin1]

yeah i definitely learned my lesson this time…gonna slow down a little going forward

At 8:30 pm i turned to my wife and apologized for the argument we would inevitably be having sometime later around 9:30-10 pm,when we would be working as a team to back the fifth wheel in my driveway in the dark

 

[NH_Bulldog]

That is the often forgotten part of the trip, it isn't like most people just drive into the yard, turn the truck off and walk into the house. There is the backing, the unhooking, the leveling, connecting power, grabbing stuff out of the camper that you need in the house tonight. It all easily adds at least another hour on top of everything else. I am at least 10 years from retiring (again), but it gets to be too much even for me.

 

[flybouy]

It all boils down to one word, fatigue. You can only fight it for so long and taking drugs, including caffeine, can only prolong the effects for a limited time. IMO It's a dangerous game with diminishing returns. Add stress to that and it can be disastrous.

When I was young I didn't need more than 4 to 5 hrs of sleep. More than 5 hrs and I felt hung over. I could hop in a car and drive from Balt to Orlando without stopping. Back in the early 1980's we threw the kids in the Dodge conversion van and headed to Divide, CO. I drove around 1,800 miles in just under 2 days and never went faster than 65 mph. Those were 2 very long days.

Those days are long since gone and looking back I was a fool for doing it. Age, experience, and a near death accident slowed me down.

 

[wiredgeorge]

That is the often forgotten part of the trip, it isn't like most people just drive into the yard, turn the truck off and walk into the house. There is the backing, the unhooking, the leveling, connecting power, grabbing stuff out of the camper that you need in the house tonight. It all easily adds at least another hour on top of everything else. I am at least 10 years from retiring (again), but it gets to be too much even for me.

Betcha Brian feels 100 percent better knowing that a young fella like you takes an hour to dock his camper.

 

[GaryUT]

That is the often forgotten part of the trip, it isn't like most people just drive into the yard, turn the truck off and walk into the house. There is the backing, the unhooking, the leveling, connecting power, grabbing stuff out of the camper that you need in the house tonight. It all easily adds at least another hour on top of everything else. I am at least 10 years from retiring (again), but it gets to be too much even for me.

It's worse for us. We store our trailer in a storage facility. Have to unload everything into the truck, then back the trailer into the bay. Go home and unload everything from the truck to the house.

I have done 700 mile days in the past but they are not any fun. I prefer to limit travel days to 300 to 350 miles. I like to start after breakfast, travel for 4 hours, stop for lunch and then 2 more hours of traveling. I want to be set up for the night by 4:00pm so we can relax for a few hours before dinner.