Travel Tip #4: PDF It!

Leave the bulky guidebooks and printouts at home by combining all your important travel information into one easily-accessible document. This saves you from fumbling for paperwork looking for hotel addresses or paid-for services, finding the right pages in the heavy guidebooks, trolling souvenir shops for maps...

Top suggestions to include:

• Travel Itineraries
• Rental Car Agreements
• Hotel Reservations
• Park Maps
• Subway and Bus Maps
• Top Restaurant suggestions or OpenTable.com reservations
• Geocache or Geotour Cache pages
• Roadside America or AtlasObscura.com attractions
• Travel Guides

Combine your files into one document. I save mine as a PDF to edit out unwanted sections/pages and add personal comments. Another advantage to saving as a PDF is most mobile devices will display it in its original format and not reformat it to fit your screen.

Then upload to a Cloud service or app to view documents offline on a smartphone or tablet (because sometimes there's no cell service. Shocking, right?) I use a free version of Dropbox, which allows me to securely save my document online and view it in my iPhone and iPad apps, TaGeez's Android, our laptop plus the Kindle Fire.

Did you know that many libraries offer you free access to travel ebooks, and you can save sections of them offline to your own Google account? (Disclaimer: I know because my company supplies the libraries). Also, many popular attractions (including the National Parks) offer downloadable travel guides. That'll save a dollar or two!

Travel Tip #3: The Loads on Our Back

In the Victorian era, young elite would take grand tours of the continent with their steamer trunks filled with clothes and toiletries and guidebooks.

Taking a clue from that, if you're road tripping with a loved one and staying at multiple hotels along your route, consider a $20 trunk from Walmart versus toting large suitcases each night.

In the morning fill a small tote (“go bag”) with the essentials for tomorrow. When you pull into the next hotel, grab your overnight bag & shower kit and head to the registration desk. Next morning, repeat - replacing old clothes for new. And if you decide to stay a few days in one spot, one end of the trunk has wheels for dragging.

Not only will you save your back while hauling your worldly goods, but you can haul a greater variety of clothing. Handy for areas where weather can vary 40° from day to night or you plan to bushwhack to some golden oldie caches or your weather app informs you of torrential downpours during the next few days of your trip.

Travel Tip #2: A Needle in a Haystack

Ah! Rental cars! Unlimited miles, bounding out on backroads. And impersonal as heck - which makes it very hard when your black SUV rental looks like all other SUVs at the rest stop or National Park.

So add a tag in the front window (this one re-used from Midwest Geobash) or one of those magnetic decals on the back.

TaGeez has not tried to climb in the wrong car once this trip.

Travel Tip #1: Leave the Anxiety at Home

Ever stress about "Did I turn it off? Faucet dripping? Door locked?" You may not be forgetful, but others in the house might be.

Solution: Snap a quick pick of all your worry points. Then, when you hit the road and your mind starts to wonder, you have proof that everything is A-OK.