How to Plan the Ultimate Road Trip

After more than a year of being cooped up due to pandemic restrictions, lots of people are itching to hit the open road and get the heck out of dodge. If that’s you, my guests have some great tips for planning and executing an awesome road trip. Their names are Jeremy and Stephanie Puglisi and they’re the proprietors of the RV Atlas blog and podcast, the authors of several books on camping and road tripping, and veteran road trippers themselves, having, together with their three boys, spent over a thousand nights at hundreds of campgrounds from coast to coast.

We start off our conversation with how the Puglisis began road tripping with a pop-up camper, and the benefits of driving places rather than flying. We then get into how to dip your toes into RVing without a big commitment, and whether thereâ€™s an ideal age to start taking RV trips with your kids. From there we get into best practices for planning and executing a road trip, whether you’re going by RV or car, including the biggest mistakes people make, the art of road trip snacks, and when it’s better to fly versus drive. We also talk about how to keep kids entertained on the road, including how to handle the issue of screen time. We end our conversation with the benefits of staying at campsites rather than hotels, why you might want to look into private KOA campgrounds, and why planning a great road trip always starts with picking a great destination.

If reading this in an email, click the title of the post to listen to the show.

Show Highlights

How the Puglisis got into road-tripping with their family
Their progression of campers and RVs
The benefits of road-tripping vs. flying
Advice for people who want to test the RV waters
Is there a perfect age for starting kids on the road trip habit?
The “startup” costs for renting/buying an RV
What are the biggest mistakes people make when planning/executing road trips
Is there an ideal length of road trip?
What about kids and screens on the road?
How to find and choose a campground
The community you can find at campgrounds

Resources/Articles/People Mentioned in Podcast

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. After more than a year of being cooped up due to pandemic restrictions, lots of people are itching to hit the open road and get the heck out of Dodge. If that’s you, my guests have some great tips for planning and executing an awesome road trip. Their names are Jeremy and Stephanie Puglisi and they are the proprietors of RV Atlas Blog and Podcast, the authors of several books on camping and road tripping and veteran road trippers themselves having, together with their three boys, spent over a thousand nights at hundreds of campgrounds from coast to coast. We start off our conversation with how the Puglisis began road tripping with a pop-up camper and the benefits of driving to places rather than flying to them. We then get into how to dip your toes into RVing without a big commitment, and whether there’s an ideal age to start taking RV trips with your kids. From there we get into best practices for planning and executing road trip whether you’re going by RV or car, including the biggest mistakes people make, the art of road trip snacks, and when it’s better to fly versus drive.

We also talk about how to keep kids entertained on the road including how to handle the issue of screen time, and we end our conversation with the benefits of staying at campsites rather than hotels, why you might wanna look into private KOA campgrounds and why planning a great road trip always starts with picking a great destination. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.ios/roadtrip.

Alright, Jeremy and Stephanie Puglisi, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Puglisi: Thank you so much for having us, Brett. It’s great to be here.

Stephanie Puglisi: Oh, thanks so much.

Brett McKay: So you all are RVers, and not only that, you help people get into RVing with books, and you have a podcast. And the book that I read, and I really enjoyed, it’s called See You at the Campground: A Guide to Discovering Community, Connection and a Happier Family in the Great Outdoors. It’s about road tripping, about RVing, but also camping instead of staying at a hotel. So what I’d like to do with this podcast, since this is the start of the summer vacation season, and a lot of people are planning vacations. A lot of people might be interested in RVing. We’re gonna talk about that, but also just wanna talk about road trips in general. I know a lot of people I’ve talked to this summer, instead of getting in a plane to get where they’re going, they’re going to take a road trip, so maybe we can use some advice from the experts. So let’s start off with this, how did you two get into RVing? What’s your story there?

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, we actually started as road trippers. [chuckle] So it’s nice that you just introed us like that because really we, before we had kids, we just loved road trips. We started dating when we were pretty young.

Jeremy Puglisi: We did a road trip to Jazz Fest in New Orleans when…

Stephanie Puglisi: We were teenagers.

Jeremy Puglisi: Stephanie and me were teenagers. Yeah, we were teenagers.

Stephanie Puglisi: And we kinda took off and headed to New Orleans and explored that, and we just traveled that way all the time over years of marriage before we had kids. We loved hopping in our car and driving somewhere and just kind of like seeing the landscape pass outside the window. It’s like slow travel to me as opposed to just getting from point A to B. You stop and enjoy the ride, right? It’s a cliche, but I think it’s true. And when kids came along, the road trip got a little bit more challenging in some ways when they were babies, so…

Jeremy Puglisi: But we really wanted to get out on the road with them. We had twins, and by the time they were 10 months old, we were really cooped up, really needed to get out of the house, so we decided to do a hotel weekend at a hotel with a water park attached. And it was a complete disaster. We put the kids to bed, realized that we had nothing to do, we had nowhere to go. That trip did not go well, so then when we got home, we started throwing around the idea of a pop-up camper, ’cause we wanted to hit the road with the boys. And soon after, bought the pop-up camper and really, really fell in love with the whole RV lifestyle.

Stephanie Puglisi: I think more than camping, we saw the pop-up camper as sort of this little portable hotel on wheels, and it was affordable, too. It’s not expensive to get a little pop-up camper. So for us, it was like, okay, we were celebrating our 10th anniversary, we had twins, that was the gift that we gave ourselves to be able to keep road tripping and keep having adventures, even though we had these little babies along with us. And funny enough, along the way, we ended up falling in love with camping, and we really discovered the joys of the campground and introducing our boys to the camping lifestyle, and that was the inspiration for this See You at the Campground book.

Brett McKay: When did you all upgrade to the RV, like the full on? What kind of RV do you guys have? And when did you upgrade to that?

Jeremy Puglisi: So we’re on like RV four or five right now, [chuckle] after the pop-up. Most RV owners upgrade every three years statistically. So after the pop-up camper, we kinda got sick of setting it up and breaking it down, ’cause we were traveling quite a lot and doing multiple-stop trips, and a the pop-up camper is not really the best thing for that because there’s a lot of set-up and break down. So I’d say 2 years after we bought a conventional travel trailer, and then after that a toy hauler and now we’re sitting in more of an upscale travel trailer. I want a motorhome. We constantly debate getting the motorhome. [chuckle] Stephanie’s not quite as excited by that idea. But yeah, we’ve been in traditional RV’s now for 6 years, 7 years.

Brett McKay: And how often are you on the road now these days?

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, obviously, the last year hasn’t been a great year for RVing for us, so we did take some trips, but typically prior to that, we probably traveled between 50 and a 100 nights a year in the RV, just depending on the year.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, I mean for a lot of RVers this past year was an amazing year. A lot of people really did hit the road, but for us, we have kids in school and we were in New Jersey where some of the travel restrictions were a bit tighter. So we probably cancelled more trips than we went on this past year, but now we’re kinda getting back in full swing for the year ahead.

Brett McKay: Alright, so Stephanie you mentioned one of the reasons you’re a big proponent of road trips, it’s like that slow travel. Besides that, what are the benefits of road tripping versus flying? What have you all found?

Stephanie Puglisi: You know, two of my boys are now in middle school, so we’ve been doing this for over a decade with them, and they’ve spent a lot of time in the back of the car in their childhood. And it was so funny over the years, teacher after teacher just kept saying like, “Your boys just have such a wide breadth of understanding of the country. They have such a expanse [chuckle] of weird knowledge,” was pretty much what they were saying.

Jeremy Puglisi: They know their red red states and the blue states.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah. And, too, it was really funny. Over the years, I have no idea how this came about, but somehow they got really interested in real estate as we were traveling, ’cause they realized so many places look different than where we are at the Jersey Shore, and they would ask like, “What does that house sell for? What do houses cost here?” So we ended up with this funny game of opening up the Zillow app, no matter where we were in the country, and the kids got fascinated with how much the cost of living is different. So I know that’s a really random example, but I just think that over the years of them staring out the window in the back seat, they just have seen the country in a way that you don’t see it when you’re up there, thousands of feet in the air.

Jeremy Puglisi: We go to South Carolina a lot. If we had just been flying in and out of Myrtle Beach, our kids would not know a lot about South Carolina. But since we were road tripping to Myrtle Beach, or Charleston, or wherever it might be, our 12-year-old boys could explain the culture of South Carolina in a pretty sophisticated way.

Stephanie Puglisi: And like the whole Route 95 corridor, and they’re like, they know what it looks like going into Richmond, and they know those stops along the way. Just this past month or two months ago, we were heading from point A to point B and Savannah was along the way. And we weren’t planning on stopping, and I looked at Jeremy and I said, “Let’s stop.” And my boys just got this wonderful 2 hours in Savannah and we ate at this ridiculously good hot dog truck. And I know my kids well enough to know now, that five years from now they’ll mention that hot dog truck in Savannah.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with a plane ride. I mean, we take planes places.

Brett McKay: We do those, too.

Jeremy Puglisi: But you don’t have that serendipity, right? That spontaneous stop, you can’t do that on a plane or a cruise. And we do that a lot in the RV. You know? “Let’s pull over here and just grab lunch in this town, and check it out for an hour or two.” And those are very rich experiences, as well, even though they weren’t planned.

Brett McKay: I also like road trips ’cause it feels more relaxing. I don’t like flying. I’ve decided I do not like flying. It’s my least favorite thing. It’s so undignified. [chuckle] You stand in line…

Stephanie Puglisi: Getting herded, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, getting herded. And then you get on the plane, you’re kind of stuffed in there. When I’m on a road trip, I also like the feeling of road trip, you feel like you’re in control. I hate being like, “Well, my flight’s delayed. I can’t do anything about that.” But the road trip it’s like, “Well, not a problem!” I can keep going.

Stephanie Puglisi: And I think that that was one of the reasons it’s been such a pleasure for us to travel this way with our kids. The joy of having those decisions at your fingertips every minute, you get a lot less stressed, right? You can always take a time-out with your kids and say, “Let’s just relax. Let’s just stop at the side of the road or at a rest stop and kick a soccer ball around.” And just having those choices with us, even bringing along… There are things that help them feel a little more comfortable has been a real blessing.

Jeremy Puglisi: In an RV, one of the things that we preach about a lot is you can pull over in a rest area and make lunch in your own kitchen. You can use your own bathroom. We don’t have to use the restaurants on the New York Freeway, if we don’t want to. So you used the word control, and I think that’s a great way to put it. It’s this interesting combination of freedom and control that makes the experience pretty awesome for us.

Brett McKay: I also like the feeling in a road trip that you’re like, “No one knows where I’m at.” For some reason, I like that, when I’m in the middle of New Mexico, I’m like, “No one knows where I’m at.” And for some reason, it just feels so good to have that feeling.

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, and this is like the year of the road trips to some degree. I think that COVID has made us all re-examine how we travel, and you’re not the only one feeling that way right now. I’m dying to get back out on the road this summer.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk a little bit about RVing. ‘Cause I know a lot of people, they like the idea of RVing, they probably saw something on Instagram. Someone’s doing the van life thing or whatever, and like, “I wanna do that.” But they’re afraid to make that leap. They don’t know if they’re actually gonna like it. Right? They like the idea, but they don’t know if they’re gonna like it. So any advice for people who wanna test the waters with RVing?

Stephanie Puglisi: I think that it is so smart to rent instead of buying an RV straight out. 10 years ago that wasn’t as easy as it is now. Now, there’s all of these RV sharing platforms, which are basically like the Airbnbs of RVing. And you can easily find a nice small motor home, which is what I suggest [chuckle] that you start with when you’re looking for a rental, and you can just try it out and see if it’s for you. Now, the price tag is a little shocking for some people. Sometimes people think, “Oh, a rental RV vacation is going to be cheaper, maybe then a fly-and-drive or a hotel stay.” That’s not necessarily the case. Remember, you’re paying for convenience, right? You’re gonna be driving your little hotel room around, you get to park it wherever you want, you get to have food in your kitchen and your own bathroom along the way. So actually you’re paying for a lot of those conveniences and it ends up, we’ve found over the years, we spend about as much on a rental RV vacation as we would on a fly and hotel stay vacation.

Jeremy Puglisi: But if you’re testing out the concept of buying an RV, yes, it might be expensive to rent a motor home for the weekend. But if you spend $600 renting a motor home for the weekend and then decide you don’t wanna buy one, you just saved $100,000. Or if you rent it, and you say, “Well, I love it. I feel more confident going ahead and buying it.” It is really, truly a great way to get a taste of it and see if you wanna make a bigger financial plunge.

Stephanie Puglisi: I would caution people that it’s not the whole experience. When you rent an RV, people have a blast doing it, and people that have done RV rental usually say their kids remembered it forever. It was such an amazing adventure. But you have to remember, there is a steep learning curve with RVs, so you’re not really getting the whole experience of having your own personal RV stocked with all of your stuff, and you know the comfort level of that. It is gonna be a little more stressful because you don’t know how to empty the tanks like we do [chuckle] as RV owners, so you’re gonna have to figure that out.

Brett McKay: Oh, so can we stop for a quick pause and a side tour on nomenclature? So you guys have been saying RVs, motor homes, pop-up, what are…

Jeremy Puglisi: They’re all RVs.

Brett McKay: They’re all RVs, okay. And why…

Jeremy Puglisi: A pop-up camper is an RV, a travel trailer is an RV, a motor home’s an RV.

Stephanie Puglisi: A pop-up camper that we owned first, they’re all RVs. And then there’s two main types of RVs. There’s a motor home, which is the kind you drive. And there’s a towable, which is the kind you pull behind a tow vehicle. And for a rental, a motor home is so much easier because it really feels like you’re driving a U-Haul truck. It really does. It’s not a big deal. I was just behind the wheel of one this past weekend, and I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a motor home in over a year, and it was fine. A towable, I think there’s a steeper learning curve on hitching up, unhitching.

Jeremy Puglisi: Like in the popular conception, in the popular mind, an RV is a motor home. But actually 90% of RVs sold are towable and only 10% are motor homes. But it’s motor homes, that’s what everybody thinks of.

Brett McKay: Guys is a pop-up camper a towable?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yes.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yes, it is. And it’s this little nice small box, and then it opens up [chuckle] and you get the tents ends and that really nice, beautiful, very dreamy kind of open tent experience.

Brett McKay: So, you recommend for people who are wanting to test the waters, maybe don’t go the towable pop-up camper, just check out a motor home.

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, I think that depends. If you’re thinking about buying a pop-up camper, why not rent a pop-up camper?

Brett McKay: Right, okay.

Jeremy Puglisi: If you’re thinking about buying a motor home, why not rent a motor home? I guess it just depends on what your intention is? If you just want a vacation, I think is what Stephanie said, yeah, take the motor home. It’s easier.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah. I would say, find your under-30-foot classy motor home, and that’s gonna be the easiest thing to kinda get around in, for your first time.

Brett McKay: Alright, so a lot of people who are doing the RV and they wanna do it, but they’ve got little kids and they’re concerned, “Ahh, are my kid’s gonna like this?” What’s been your experience? Should people be concerned about that? Or is there an age you recommend you start taking your kids in an RV? Or can you go right when they’re fresh out of the womb, basically?

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, we did go. They were pretty fresh out of the womb.

Jeremy Puglisi: One of them was like…

Stephanie Puglisi: Our third was six weeks old, I think, the first time we took him camping. [chuckle] He’s lived his whole life at the campground. But I do think that one piece of feedback we hear a lot… Our kids have been doing this their whole life, but the one piece of feedback that we hear is that people who start older with their kids wish they had started younger, right? When you wait to get to that middle school age, is anything cool in middle school? Right? Do middle schoolers actually enjoy anything? Or they’ve kind of gotten that too cool for school air about them. We’ve heard that from a lot of parents that when they raised their kids with this experience, it was something that they looked forward to every year.

Jeremy Puglisi: And conversely, we’ve heard from people, “Well, I don’t wanna buy an RV. My kids are too young, they’re not gonna remember it. I wanna wait till their older. And Stephanie and I have really never believed that. We think there’s incredible value in traveling with your kids, even if they are at an age where they won’t technically remember it. Because we’ve always felt like you’re training them to be travelers, you’re training them to be road trippers, you’re training them to be flexible. So we always tell people, start as young as you can possibly start. I mean, a baby that can’t sleep is gonna keep you awake at home or in the RV, so you might as well be somewhere beautiful and exciting.

Stephanie Puglisi: I’ll also say that we didn’t fly. Because we had our camper and our RVing trips, we didn’t fly with our boys until they were, I think 7 and 4, somewhere in that age range. And by the time we did fly with them, they knew how to travel. They were such great travelers that our first airport experience was just seamless. They were fine. They knew how to be team players, because we’ve taught them to break down a campsite or set up a campsite or carry a luggage around. They had no problems. And I was like, I really had felt like it was the perfect segue into different kinds of travel with them.

Jeremy Puglisi: Our kids know how to be in new environments and to thrive in new environments, and we really feel like travel’s contributed to that. They’re not afraid to go out for this team or to step into this new environment or to go meet this new friend, and we think that part of that is all the traveling over the years.

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, we also trained them to have a little more independence at the campground too, right? We would be at these campgrounds and it would be a pretty safe place to be able to teach them how to ride their bikes. I think all three of our kids learned how to ride bikes at a campground. And then you can say, “Okay, you can go to the camp store by yourself for the first time,” when they’re however old, and they learn how to have money in their pocket and go to the camp store. And I think a lot of those life events were a little easier for us to train and manage because we were in these little pockets of community that a campground is.

Brett McKay: Alright, so one last question about the RVs before we move on. So you mentioned, cost for renting one, about the same price you’d pay for a fly and hotels, so we’re looking at $2000, $3000?

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, so usually I would say the kind that I mentioned, like the motor home would be 2-something, $200-something a night. Obviously, our prices here in the Northeast may be a little higher than some other people’s prices, but in the 200 range.

Brett McKay: Gotcha.

Stephanie Puglisi: And then you have a campground cost, remember. So that’s gonna vary. If you stay at a public campground, you could have one as low as $20, $30 a night, or if you stay at a resort or Fort Wilderness in Disney World, you could pay $200 a night. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: And then what’s the price… What’s the going rate for an RV motor home or pop-up camper these days?

Jeremy Puglisi: So a pop-up camper brand new could start at under $10,000, and then the conventional travel trailers that we’re in could be 20 to 30 to 40. The big fifth-wheels can be 60, 70, $80,000, and then, generally speaking, motor homes start at about $80,000 and you could go as high as you want. If you’re in a customized Prevost or something, you could be spending a million dollars, but there’s a lot of plus/minus in the $100,000 mark for motor homes.

Brett McKay: So it just depends on what you want. You get as fancy as you want, or as simple?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and if you get a diesel or a gas engine in the motor home. So if you get a diesel engine, then you’re looking more at over $200,000. If you’re staying in a gas engine, it’s gonna be typically less than $200,000. The RV industry’s done a great job at having a really wide variety of price points and floor plans, and there’s way more to choose from than when you’re buying a truck, right? When I go to buy a truck, there’s the three or four major brands, there’s not many options for floor plans. People get really actually flustered and confused RV shopping ’cause there’s so many options. So it’s kind of a positive and a negative.

Brett McKay: And then I imagine… I think you did the cost breakdown on the book. Once you make the investment and buy an RV, your cost of vacation start plummeting.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, for sure. And you can control your costs, right? I could splurge on every RV vacation, but you can also eat in. The biggest cost when we go away with our RV is food. Eating out all of those meals with three kids adds up, and my two older boys eat like adults. So our sticker shock at restaurant bills is really high. And in the RV, we’ll have breakfast, lunch and dinner some days, all at the RV. Even in Disney World, we’ll do breakfast and dinner at the RV and maybe have lunch in a park or something. I mean, you can just save so much money on that food price point.

Jeremy Puglisi: Eating out when we’re staying in a hotel could easily be $300 a day. With our RV and our own kitchen, it could be $300 a week.

Stephanie Puglisi: Same as our food bill at home, really.

Brett McKay: Alright, so a lot of people are gonna take an RV, but a lot of people are just gonna go on a road trip just in their cars. You guys have been doing this for years. What are the biggest mistakes you’ve made or you see people make when planning and executing a road trip?

Stephanie Puglisi: So I really think that these days you have to plan ahead. I know everybody loves the idea of jumping in the car and let’s see how far we go before we need to stop. I’ve found that that actually only causes stress. Every time we wanna be casual about our plans, [chuckle] it really causes stress as opposed to feeling free and adventurous. So I do recommend really knowing where you’re gonna stop for the night.

Jeremy Puglisi: And there’s freedom in the discipline. Stephanie is a very disciplined trip planner. And then that opens up a lot of time on the trip and a lot of freedom on the trip, ’cause we’re not worried about getting this reservation or getting tickets for that or renting kayaks here. We do all of that ahead of the time, even though it might not sound as fun to do it that way, but we plan a trip from top to bottom and leave open spaces.

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, yeah. I learned early on like, “Oh, you think, Oh, let’s just see how it goes.” And then the one day that you’re in this town is the day that is the Monday when they don’t do the rafting tours that you wanted to go on and you didn’t know that ahead of time. Or you find out that just a lot of things get booked up in advance. Some of the most magical experiences we’ve had, like, I’m remembering going out on that chuck wagon ride in South Dakota and just having this amazing night of having this steak dinner out in the middle of the Black Hills. And those are things that sell out, and you just have to plan ahead if you wanna have some of these amazing experiences.

Jeremy Puglisi: I think another mistake people are going to make this summer is heading to the most popular places. I’m all about going to Yellowstone. I’m all about going to Yosemite, Acadia National Park. But if you’re gonna go to Acadia National Park on a summer weekend and you plan on doing the park loop road, it’s probably not gonna be fun. You’re probably not gonna be at the park. This summer with the number of people road tripping, this might be the summer to do the Beartooth Mountains in Idaho instead of Yellowstone. This might be the summer to do North Cascades in Washington instead of Olympic. It really could be the summer to find some things that are off the beaten track a little bit.

Stephanie Puglisi: And not just off the beaten track, but off of peak hours. So another mistake that people make, and we see it all the time as travel writers, and people tell you about their experiences in places. The difference between experiencing an amazing location at 8 o’clock in the morning, when you’re the only people there or one of the handful, and at 1:00 PM in the afternoon when the tour buses have arrived, and everybody is like flooding the place, it’s just night and day. There is no comparison between the same place. We’ve been in these places at these different times, and it’s like, “Wow, you just really have a hard time enjoying with the crowds.” I know that’s the case of places like Mount Rushmore. You hear people talking about Rushmore, “Oh my gosh, we went on the 4th of July and you couldn’t breathe. There were people everywhere.” And so we really encourage people to find those off-peak times. We’ve always gone to popular places early in the morning. Some people go later in the day. Also go during the week as much as possible, instead of the weekend. Really try to take yourself to places outside of peak hours.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Alright, so biggest mistakes. Okay, first off you wanna plan. Don’t try to do the, “I’m gonna fling it,” road trip. And then don’t go to popular places, ’cause you’re not gonna have a good time and then try to plan your things off of peak hours.

Stephanie Puglisi: Can I say one more? [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah, go for it.

Stephanie Puglisi: Because I’m a mom, I’m gonna tell you never be without food and drinks. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: That’s a good one.

Stephanie Puglisi: I think if everybody gets cranky when they’re thirsty and when they’re hungry, and so we really always have food and beverages, coolers in the back with some cold drinks. Jeremy is like the king of the cold drink cooler. And it just… Everybody can get a break, have a snack and have a refreshing drink when they need it, and that makes a difference.

Brett McKay: Well, what’s your philosophy towards road-trip snacks? Do you buy them all before you leave or do you buy stuff along the way at the gas stations you see along the freeway?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yes and yes.

Stephanie Puglisi: It’s a mess.

Jeremy Puglisi: We pack a lot of snacks ’cause it’s obviously cheaper to buy a box of Clif Bars than to buy one at the rest stop every single time. But no matter how much Stephanie does pack in terms of snacks and drinks, we do seem to plough through them and end up refueling along the way at the Pilot Flying J, or whatever it is.

Stephanie Puglisi: Oh, my kids are suckers for the snack aisle in a gas station. So we kind of do a balance. We always make sure we have healthier food. I love those single-serving hummus with crackers or things like that that are like, “Okay guys, we can take a break from the Slushy machine at the gas station.” But then at the same time, you feel like it’s part of the experience. They get excited for those rest stops, and so you can’t completely take away the joy of a 12-year-old boy wandering at the Pilot Flying J.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, we just drove 5 hours for a yogurt, you know, ’cause it’s…

Brett McKay: Yeah, so yeah.

Stephanie Puglisi: So we try to balance it, and I feel like that’s the case with everything on a road trip. And it gets too much, if you’re eating out every meal, your kids start to get pretty cranky and miserable, and you do too. And then if you’re not eating out at all, you’re missing out on the joy of a food culture in a place and experiencing that. So it sounds so corny, but it really is about balance, and that balance is gonna change every single road trip that you go on.

Brett McKay: Alright, so pre-packs of snacks, but also make room for the Funyuns at the Love’s Country Store.

Stephanie Puglisi: Combos, if you’re our kids. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, the combo, yeah. My kids love the combos, too. So let’s talk about this. What do you think is the right length for a road trip?

Jeremy Puglisi: So in terms of how far you drive or in terms of how many days you go away?

Brett McKay: Ooh. Both.

Jeremy Puglisi: So we drove to Mount Rushmore, to South Dakota, and on the way out, we broke up the trip and stayed in Indiana, and it was totally great, it was totally fine. And we had an amazing trip in South Dakota. It was one of our best family trips ever. We were out there for two weeks, but then we drove straight home. We stayed one night.

Stephanie Puglisi: 20 hours, maybe.

Jeremy Puglisi: And it was just like three 10-hour days of driving in a row, and we were all miserable. That just did not work for our family, so in retrospect, I wish we had stopped a little more, had a day off, done something, done the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland or something on the way home to break that up. So multiple days of driving in a row is definitely too much for us.

Stephanie Puglisi: Everybody’s gonna have a different tolerance. I found, after a decade with the boys, and we have gone all over the country, my rule over the last few years that I try to stay firm on with Jeremy, but sometimes I give in, is that if I have to drive more than one full day, more than a 12-hour day, plus some, we’re flying. [chuckle] So we used to do a lot more longer, but I was like, you know what, if it’s more than that, and we’re just gonna be blowing through from point A to point B, and we’re not gonna be stopping and enjoying the sights, then let’s fly. And then often times we rent a car and do a nice road trip loop. We did this in the Pacific Northwest. We flew into Seattle, we did an amazing road trip all the way down to the red woods and back up on a loop. We hit so many amazing places, and that was a better way to do that as opposed to driving across country, which would have been miserable.

Jeremy Puglisi: And that is tied into us having three younger kids. If we were retired, you just take your time getting wherever you’re going, but we often have a 10-day window before there’s the next soccer tryout or before schools back in session, or whatever. So we will definitely travel differently when the kids are out of the picture.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, and I think that now I just go, you know what, 10 hours, our boys can actually get through 10 hours, no problem. Longer than that, I’m gonna tap out. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: So it sounds like here, when you’re planning a road trip, if you’re just trying to get to a destination that’s far away, because you wanna do something there, your best bet, fly there. But if you have time and you need to get to that destination, but you have time to get there, to make stops throughout, road tripping’s okay.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, and do a loop. This is something that we’ve learned. If you’re just doing the same route there and back, you lose the magic of that road trip. But if you can plan a loop, like we did out in South Dakota, our trip out to South Dakota or out in the Pacific Northwest, where we went out in a big circle basically through Washington, Oregon and California. So every stop along the way is different, and fun.

Jeremy Puglisi: But we had 28 days to go to the Pacific Northwest. So we chose to fly, and there was two days of flying and 26 days in the Pacific Northwest. If we had towed our RV during those 26 days or whatever, half of it would have been driving.

Stephanie Puglisi: Getting there, yeah.

Jeremy Puglisi: Flying and driving’s perfectly fine, too. You can maximize your time out a place if it’s far away.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Alright, so do you guys have a limit? So 10 hours a day is probably your limit on what you’re willing to drive?

Jeremy Puglisi: It gets dicey after that…

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, we just did… What did we just do? 17 hours?

Jeremy Puglisi: We drove straight back from Florida to New Jersey. But we had to.

Stephanie Puglisi: 17 hours. But we had to and we did it. And the thing is, is we talked before about training our kids. Honestly, our kids are so well-trained [chuckle] that we did it. We were just miserable because we kept swapping back and forth to drive.

Jeremy Puglisi: And let’s be honest too, devices help on that type of drive.

Stephanie Puglisi: Oh yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Puglisi: We’re not playing roadside bingo the whole time.

Stephanie Puglisi: Right. It’s not 12 hours of the license plate game. The kids are staring at their phones, blessedly.

Brett McKay: I wanna talk more about that screen time on road trips, but before we do that, have you guys done that thing where… I know there were some families that I know that do this, where they’ll leave at 9 o’clock at night, so the kids sleep and then they drive during the night. Have you guys done that thing?

Stephanie Puglisi: We tried. [chuckle]

Jeremy Puglisi: Just about very time.

Stephanie Puglisi: We tried. [chuckle]

Jeremy Puglisi: That can work really, really well. And for us, we’re in New Jersey and we road trip a lot up into New England, we go to Cape Cod a lot, and by doing that, you miss all the morning traffic around New York City or around DC. That allows us to go North or South and get past some major metropolitan areas, and our kids actually love that. They actually…

Stephanie Puglisi: They love to drive, yeah.

Jeremy Puglisi: They actually, for whatever reason, they love packing up the car, getting in at 9 o’clock at night and knowing they get to conk out while we get to do all the the hard work, basically.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, and the only issue for parents to consider with that is, will your kids actually sleep? When our older two were little and we tried it a couple of times, it was not successful because they didn’t sleep through the night like they were supposed to. But now that they’re older, they’ll just pass out in the car again, once we get in. So will your kids sleep? And do you have the stamina to get through the next day [chuckle] after driving all night? And your kids are ready for vacation ’cause they’re well rested and are you? So it’s just gonna be different for everybody, whether that works, but it’s a great strategy if you’ve got the stamina to do it.

Brett McKay: Alright, you mentioned screens and your kids. What’s your guys’ take on keeping kids entertained on a road trip?

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, my most important take is that it’s not my business what anybody else does with screens and their kids, so we’ll share what we’ve done…

Brett McKay: Yeah, share what you’ve done.

Stephanie Puglisi: You know, our struggle, but I think it’s one of those areas that people get so super judgy about and it just drives me crazy, because we all have our own kids and they’re so different. And also, I feel like it’s unfair. I wrote about this in our book a little bit. We’re the first generation of parent that had to navigate this, right? When we were young, our parents, there weren’t screens to bring on vacation with us, so they didn’t have to worry about it, it wasn’t an option. Now, it’s so much work to manage screen time, and there’s gonna be certain parents that just don’t wanna work more on vacation and manage screen time. So I understand that, and I just wanna give a high five to every parent out there that has to spend so much of their life dealing with this issue, ’cause it can be exhausting.

Jeremy Puglisi: But we’re liberal with it in the car on the trip there. But when we’re in a location, when we’re at Glacier National Park for 12 days, we really cut it down to close to nothing. But then again, when we were at Glacier, we did a 12-mile round-trip hike out to a glacier. All our kids did that hike. It was a 9-hour hike. If they wanted to come home and watch a movie that night, we are totally cool with that.

Stephanie Puglisi: That’s okay. We don’t wanna do anything now.

Jeremy Puglisi: You’ve earned it.

Stephanie Puglisi: I can say, I was really strict with screens when they were younger, so now that they’re older, they have their devices in the car. But when they were little, they didn’t, and I really wanted them to learn how to stare out the window. And I really wanted my kids to learn how to be bored and just let their imaginations roam. And I am glad I made that choice. We never had a DVD player, a car with the DVD players in the back of the seats or whatever, and we never bought a car with that, ’cause I was just like, “I don’t want that to be the default when we get in a car. I want kids to look out the window.” It was always really important to me.

Jeremy Puglisi: That useful boredom, that autobiographical planning, that day-dreaming. So look, we’ve definitely had our struggles with that along the way, just like any other family, there’s no magical answer to it. We were camping just last weekend, and the boys asked if they could watch a movie in the RV Saturday night, and I got totally annoyed at them. I was like, “It’s beautiful out, it’s our first real trip of the season. Go outside, be kids. You’re not watching a movie right now.”

Stephanie Puglisi: But then other times it’s like, “Yeah, it’s cozy, go in the RV and watch a movie.” And I think I’m glad that we were strict at the time, because I think I put a schedule in the book too that we used to follow where I would do everything in units. Okay, we’d have snack time, and then maybe we’d have some game time, and then maybe we’d have some audio book. Our boys loved audio books for years, and we’d listened to audio books on the way to any destination. A lot of the time I’d tried to link it to where we were going. For example, I always remember listening to the I Survived Mount St. Helens novel on our way to Mount St. Helens. Things like that were really fun. So not having screens forced us to come up with things we like together. Everybody had their own SiriusXM channel that it would be like, “Okay, it’s your turn. Which channel do you want?” And our boys would pick Elvis or the Beatles channel and they would get four songs on each channel. So we did spend years and years being super creative with our kids, in that time. And now they’re a little bit older, fine, be on your phone while we’re driving.

Brett McKay: Yeah, our philosophy is… My kids, they’re 10 and 7. Our philosophy on road trips is you get 2 hours no screens, 1 hour with screen. That seems to work.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, and that’s what we really did for years, we did those blocks of time and then, “Okay, now here’s my phone and you can watch a show,” and it worked well.

Brett McKay: Do you guys do license plate games? Pinch bug? Slug bug?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, well…

Stephanie Puglisi: I used to have… [chuckle]

Jeremy Puglisi: Stephanie has all these card games and these national park trivia games and so the very compact games that are actually in the RV in the cabinet right now, right by where I am.

Stephanie Puglisi: 3-second rule is a really fun one for the car, right? ‘Cause you give them a topic and they have to name a certain amount of things, and it’s just anything with just cards is very fun for the car ride and they really enjoy those things, too. Something I recommend is keeping separate things that you only enjoy when you’re in your RV or you’re on a road trip because they become special and they look forward to that.

Jeremy Puglisi: We kept that national park trivia in the glove compartment of the truck. So if they got in the jeep, pull that out, that came out and we played.

Brett McKay: Do you guys split up driving on a road trip?

Jeremy Puglisi: Absolutely. I tow the RV, but if it’s just a road trip, we totally split it up. But when it’s towing the RV, I do the towing.

Stephanie Puglisi: Yeah, I used to and then we got… Jeremy wanted a certain size RV, and I tapped out of the towing at that point. I’m just super… It makes me really anxious and stressed. I believe I can. I believe women can do everything, right? Fine, but I’m not comfortable.

Jeremy Puglisi: I’m also a horrible navigator, so when she was towing and I was in charge of navigation, it did not really go well. So it just was a better match up for me towing something.

Stephanie Puglisi: And you’re bad at managing the snack stand that the boys require. [chuckle]

Jeremy Puglisi: The snack bar. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Right. And what do you all do to keep yourselves entertained, or do you just like to zone out and just watch the road?

Stephanie Puglisi: No, we love podcasts. We listen to…

Jeremy Puglisi: A lot of podcasts. We’re podcasters and we love listening to podcasts, so we devour podcasts on the road.

Stephanie Puglisi: And music. Yeah. But I can’t listen to audio books when Jeremy’s driving because he says they put him to sleep.

Jeremy Puglisi: I don’t know why, but they put me to sleep. Yeah.

Brett McKay: They put you to sleep. I think there’s a new podcast series out, or there’s something where they’ve hired… Some company’s hired celebrities, and you can do a road trip and they’ll have like Kevin Costner telling you about the history of where you’re at. It’s like real-time, ’cause somehow it uses GPS and it can tell where you’re at, and you basically have Kevin Costner telling you about the buffalo here. Have you heard about… I don’t…

Jeremy Puglisi: I’m in, I’ll do it.

Stephanie Puglisi: You’re ringing a bell, because I think that somebody in my work had mentioned this to me, but I haven’t actually dug in and checked this out.

Brett McKay: We’ll have to… Okay, I’m gonna dig in and find it. We’ll link to it in the show. I remember, I thought that sounded kinda cool. I’d want Kevin Costner telling me about Dances with Wolves or something. Alright, so speaking of planning your road trips, going back to this, do you, when you plan a road trip, you have things you wanna do in advance, you wanna do the chuck wagon dinner in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota, but do you also kind of set schedule time to do stuff off the beaten path, like do you… So you can visit the thing or like the world’s largest rocking chair if it somehow shows up on your road trip?

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, South Dakota’s a great example of doing that because, in one sense, you could look at the ride out to the Badlands and Mount Rushmore as being boring, if you didn’t know that there were all these bizarre roadside attractions, but like…

Stephanie Puglisi: The Corn Palace.

Jeremy Puglisi: The Corn Palace. And then there was that outdoor sculpture garden. I’m forgetting the name of it. It was just so quirky and bizarre and weird and it’s near Mitchell, South Dakota.

Stephanie Puglisi: And we did not plan on stopping and these sculptures were just rising out of nowhere. We were like, “Oh, we have to… ” And we had to actually get off on a dirt road to get there and we were like…

Jeremy Puglisi: It was beautiful there, though.

Stephanie Puglisi: “Are we getting lost here?” And it was so much fun.

Jeremy Puglisi: It was like a trip highlight. So we absolutely really do like to build in that stuff, and again, sometimes we are in a rush to get to vacation ’cause we have kids and a limited time, and when we are older and retired we’ll take even more time for that, but I think that is a huge part of the joy of our RVing and road tripping in general, is to allow yourself to just take that left turn and find something you weren’t planning on finding.

Brett McKay: I’m sure you guys have written guides about this, but do you think the guides, like road trip guides are useful to kinda give you an itinerary so you don’t to think too much about it?

Stephanie Puglisi: I love guides that offer you a framework for like suggestions and then you can curate it according to your own personal preferences. I think people that know themselves have great traveling experiences, and people that don’t know themselves end up unhappy. Because what they did is they took a guide from maybe some outside, online, cliff climbing adventure. And they were like, “I’m gonna do this.” And that’s not their wheelhouse maybe, or they’re not actually gonna be happy staying at a glamping tent where they have to go to a bathhouse in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. You have to know, “Is this gonna make me happy or miserable?”

Jeremy Puglisi: I used to all the time buy hiking guides and it would say, It’s a moderate hike, great for kids. And we would go do this hike and it was horribly difficult. And eventually…

Stephanie Puglisi: I had a baby on my back. [laughter]

Jeremy Puglisi: Stephanie was like, “Stop using those hiking books.” And now we just ask a park ranger.

Stephanie Puglisi: Well, I also love…

Brett McKay: AllTrails?

Stephanie Puglisi: AllTrails. Thank you. I was about to say AllStays.

Brett McKay: I like AllTrails. We’ve used that a lot when we’ve gone on trips. So you guys are big proponents of staying at camping grounds instead of staying at a hotel or motel when you’re on a road trip. What are the benefits of camping while on a road trip?

Jeremy Puglisi: It’s less expensive. You’re definitely in nature more. You’re stepping out of your tent or your cabin or your RV, and you are outside. So it does force you to be outside a lot more than a hotel, and for us with little kids they step out of the RV and they can be kids. They can run around. They can make some noise. They can start throwing the football around. In a hotel if they step out into the hallway… Our kids do run around in the hallway, but they’re not supposed to. Stepping outside is a big part of it, getting out into nature is part of it.

Stephanie Puglisi: I think travel can be very challenging for kids, and that’s okay. And they need to decompress oftentimes at the end of a day of structured tourism, if that’s what you’re doing. And even a hike, yes, they’re being active on it, but they’re also being deliberately guided in a certain direction in a certain activity. And our boys have always needed that free outdoor decompression time at the end of a day of travel. It’s been such a blessing to us to discover that way of stay in that type of accommodation because they can ride their bikes, they go to the playground, they go to the basketball hoop. And it just allows everybody to relax and chill out, even though we had a very active, fun, adventuring day.

And they are almost like little communities, each of these campgrounds. A lot of people say it’s almost like what the American downtown was. It’s like your neighbors are friendly, your kids can roam around a little bit, we always feel very safe at campgrounds, so it gives them a sense of community at a campground that maybe our neighborhoods aren’t totally providing right now.

Brett McKay: When you guys choose campgrounds, are you looking for certain amenities?

Jeremy Puglisi: So we like both state parks and national parks with limited amenities, and we love the RV resorts. And it’s part of our businesses to see all of them, so what we’ve loved to do over the years is like we’ll do a two-stop trip, and we’ll go to the national park campground first. We did the Platte River Campground at Sleeping Bear Dunes, and there’s really no amenities there, and there’s no hook-ups. It’s more simple. It’s a more back-to nature experience. So we’ll do something like that for five days, and then we’ll go to the off-the-hook RV resort and reward the boys, and like, okay, there’s a pool here, there’s a playground, there’s food onsite, and then we can dump our tanks there as well. So we actually love doing both and often do both in the same trip.

Brett McKay: Can you tell us about the world of private campgrounds? ‘Cause I think when most people think of car camping, they’re thinking of state or national parks. That’s what I’ve done. But in my experience, and other people have experienced this too, it’s really bad right now if you go to the national parks is finding a camping spot can be impossible. So it’s like you have to schedule a year in advance. What’s with private campgrounds? What are those like?

Jeremy Puglisi: So private campgrounds really are a great option for this year. And you’re 1000% right that the most popular national park campgrounds are booked solid. You’re not getting a site inside Yosemite National Park this summer unless you just get crazy, crazy lucky. So then the private campgrounds are gonna offer an alternative. A lot of times there are great private campgrounds outside of the national parks, 15 minutes outside, 30 minutes outside. They’re gonna cost more. They’re going to have more amenities, particularly for RVers. The sites are oftentimes going to be smaller and less private, because oftentimes they are more built for RVers. So a lot of times tent campers don’t necessarily love those types of campgrounds, but they do provide a really great option. If you can’t get into that national park you’re dreaming about, I would totally tell people try a KOA campground, like around Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If you wanna be in the park right now, it’s gonna be difficult to get a site. But there’s 5 or 6 KOAs surrounding the camp, around the national park, and they are definitely gonna have more availability. They’re not necessarily as stunning or as beautiful, and they are gonna cost more but a great way to go if you can’t get that dream site inside a national park.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I was looking up about KOA ’cause I remember when I was a kid road tripping, going down I-40, and you’d see KOA. And they’d have like the Family Circus kids, for… I guess they were the spokespeople… Are they still the spokespeople for KOA?

Jeremy Puglisi: No, but that relationship, that was for decades. They did the KOA catalogue covers always had that on the cover.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the Family Circus. I was… I didn’t know anything about that. And so I looked up KOA, like what is this… I was impressed. They had pictures. Like, this actually looks really nice. It always looked kind of chintzy the way they advertised on billboards, but I was… They had showers and they had campfires. It looked pretty nice.

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, they guarantee certain things, too. So there’s always gonna be laundry facilities there. There’s always a dog park at a KOA. They are reliable and it’s more standardized. And there’s like 500 of them in the country, and some are just kinda right off the interstate and nothing spectacular, but then there are others that are incredibly beautiful. In Cape Hatteras, there’s a KOA right on the beach in Cape Hatteras. You can be camping right next to the ocean, just walk over the dunes and you’re right at the beach. There’s a wide variety of types of campgrounds in the KOA system.

Brett McKay: Okay, benefits/pros of private campgrounds, you have a lot of nice amenities, but it’s gonna be… Like, what’s the going rate for a night at a KOA?

Jeremy Puglisi: Probably $60-$100, depending on the region of the country you’re in.

Brett McKay: Oh, wow.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, I mean… You definitely could, and if you’re tent camping, maybe you could get something for 40 or 50. If you want the RV site with water, electric, and sewer you’re definitely looking 60 and up. Campground prices are kind of shocking people at private campgrounds, because a lot of private campgrounds have moved to what they call dynamic pricing, which is really based on supply and demand.

Stephanie Puglisi: More like hotels have always done.

Jeremy Puglisi: Like hotels. And because there has been this massive influx of millions of new campers, they just are able to charge more.

Brett McKay: Will you all ever stay in like a motel while on a road trip, like a roadside, like an old…

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, we’re going to Yellowstone this summer, and we’re staying at off campground. We’re flying in, and then we’re saying at off campgrounds, and then the last two nights, we’re in a hotel in Jackson Hole.

Stephanie Puglisi: Jackson Hole, yeah.

Jeremy Puglisi: ‘Cause we just wanted to have a pool, and we wanted to be right downtown. We wanted to be able to roll out of bed and walk around, so we do…

Stephanie Puglisi: We tend to prefer Airbnbs, I feel like when we travel without our camper, just because we are so used to having our own kitchen and bathroom. And it just works better for us, but our boys are such little travelers and they love a hotel experience. They just love the discovery, they love going to a place and saying, “What’s our accommodation gonna be like?”

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah. They also love leaving their AirPods at the hotel room, and the weird thing I discovered, if you leave your AirPods in the RV, no problem. If you leave him in a hotel room, they’re gone. So just all these little differences that jump out at me when we stay in a hotel, and I always come back to wanting to be in the RV. And out of everyone in the family, I’m probably the most dedicated to it.

Stephanie Puglisi: Oh yeah, Max told me the other day, he said, “Mom, I kind of miss airports. Isn’t that weird?” He just said that to me and he goes, “You know, just getting there and going and getting a Jamba Juice.” I just realized to him, it’s a whole story. Every type of travel has its whole thing that goes along with it. And those are just different types of memories that they’re making, and so I love it all, I really do.

Brett McKay: One last question for me. So what would be your recommendation for someone who wants to start road tripping? Like how do you get started? Should they just start with a weekend road trip? Should they go like plan a big one?

Stephanie Puglisi: No, don’t be over ambitious. [chuckle] That’s my biggest recommendation is first of all, have a great destination for sure. I think too many people… I always say people are like, “How do you hike with kids?” Well, first of all, don’t take them to a path in the woods and call it a hike. Of course, they’re gonna be bored. It’s a walk in the woods and they’re kids. Take them to an amazing waterfall or something that really sparks their curiosity, and the same thing goes with a road trip. Have a destination that’s exciting and fun and it’s a good pay-off.

Jeremy Puglisi: If you’re doing it with kids, you do have to consider their interests and hobbies, too. My next thing… Which my boys don’t know about yet, I’m gonna surprise them with this… Is I’m gonna do a boys’ trip to Boston and do a Red Sox game, because we’re Red Sox fans, but because we wanna see them live. So you have to consider what everybody likes on the trip.

Brett McKay: Well, hey, Stephanie and Jeremy, where can people go to learn more about your work?

Jeremy Puglisi: So it’s The RV Atlas everywhere, it’s The RV Atlas Podcast, it’s thervatlas.com, it’s The RV Atlas on Instagram. And then the two most recent books are Where Should We Camp Next? Which is a 50-state guide to the best campgrounds in the country. And as you mentioned before, See You At the Campground, and you can get those at book stores anywhere.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Stephanie and Jeremy, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Stephanie Puglisi: Oh, thanks so much for having us. We really appreciate it.

Jeremy Puglisi: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guests today were Jeremy and Stephanie Puglisi. They’re the authors of several books on road tripping and camping. Latest is See You At The Campground. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about their work at their website, thervatlas.com, or you also check out their podcast there. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/roadtrip, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives with thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you could think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us your review on Apple Podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or a family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

Trent Schill

Submitted by: Trent Schill in Dayton, OH, USA