Make Road Trips Easier With These Genius Hacks
By JORDAN WIRTH
Being broken down is stressful, so the AAA has a simple recommendation: get your vehicle serviced. You'll avoid the vast majority of breakdowns that way.
Car Service
Test your battery, check fluids like oil and power steering, address any leaks, fill all tires, swap out dirty air filters, and bring a functional spare tire and emergency kit.
A car's charging ports often leave a lot to be desired, so bring a good quality power bank to charge multiple devices from a single block that fits in your hand.
Power Bank
Cell phone use contributes to 12% of car accidents, but you need it for directions and music. To solve this, get a phone stand with a magnetic mounting plate.
Phone Stand
Avoid any suction cup varieties, as these are a pain to mount and tend to fall off easily. Vent-mounted stands are the most versatile and easiest to deploy.
It sucks when your music or podcast cuts out because you lost the signal, so download as much audio media as possible. Get a wide variety of media to switch between.
Offline Media
Get free audiobooks from your local library via Libby, download podcasts, or chip away at your TED Talk backlog. You can even listen to downloaded YouTube videos in audio format.
AirTags make for convenient solutions to track vehicles, making it easy to find where you parked. A single tag costs $29 and has a battery rated to last an entire year.
AirTag
There are competing versions for Android that also work well. Keeping track of your vehicle in a foreign city is a lot easier when you can see it as a dot on the map.