The Rest Warrior

Where to sleep during cross-country road trips

By this time tomorrow I’ll be doing a canon ball run to Colorado. My older daughter’s fiancée lives there and I’ve been tasked with moving him 1000 miles back Houston so they can be together. Having grown up in a road tripping family, I still love extremely long car rides, so this trip is going to be a nice vacation. Beef jerky, audiobooks, endless miles of prairie, and a mind free of worries. Heck yeah!

In my younger days (aka last year) I considered anything under 1200 miles to be doable non-stop. However, those who love me have asked that I stop these mad dashes. Enter Plan B, sleeping along the way. But since money is tight, I’m falling back on three free places to stop and get some shut eye. What are these three? Rest areas, National Forests & Grasslands, and my dad’s favorite, old cemeteries.

The obvious one are the many rest areas found along America’s roadways - but different states have different regulations on how long one can stop. As a general rule of thumb, the closer you are to the East Coast the shorter you’re allowed to stop at one. Places like New Jersey limit you to four hours and Maryland only three! Meanwhile, the Southwestern states such as Texas and New Mexico give you twenty four hours. Go to InterstateAreas.com to see the rules for every state. Another great service of that website is its Map of All Rest Areas. I love this website!

Rest areas have nice amenities, but even better in my opinion are the National Forests & Grasslands which dot the USA. Note, the Google Maps link only shows a small number of these locations. There are many more but they do take some digging to find. In most cases, they allow free camping up to fourteen days in first-come-first-serve campsites. However, reach out to the specific locations forest rangers to be sure. The explosion of vanlifers have swamped many of these forests, leading to degradation and disrespecting the land, resulting in some places needing to be closed to recover from the damage. If you stay on one of these, PLEASE respect the land!

My dad was a traveling salesman for a number of years, leaving early in the morning and getting home late. During this time, he memorized the location of dang near every small, old, rural cemetery in Minnesota. They were his preferred spot to eat a sandwich and take a nap. Clumps of trees would provide shade and reduce his chances of being spotted by a passersby. More than a few times he’d pull into one after a long day hunting deer or ducks, and sleep the night away rather than drive home exhausted. I’ll admit, the first few times I did this it was a bit unnerving, but now I’m always checking for “Cemetery Road” along my path. Google Maps allows a detailed sky view of the cemeteries, allowing you to prejudge if it has good hiding spots.

During the summer, sleeping in a vehicle can be HOT, even at night. To help with this I’ve found two things that help tremendously:

Rechargeable Fan that clips to steering wheel, creating a cooling breeze. It can also be hung from interior vehicle handles or set on the dash.

Mesh Ventilation Window Screens to let air flow through the vehicle but keeping bugs out. These come in 4-packs, shaped to cover front and rear windows.

It’ll be an eleven hour drive tomorrow to the National Grassland where I’ll spend the night, sleeping in my vehicle. The particular location is 15 miles off the main highway, but it looks really nice. No, I’m not telling you where it is until I get back home…and if I really like it, maybe not even then!

-Mark “Merriwether” Vorderbruggen, Ph.D.

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