There are many ways in which we plan our adventures but here are just a few of the different resources and tactics we use.
First up we decide on the location.This could be chosen for many different reasons. For our upcoming summer roadtrip, we chose France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Black Forest in Germany as a start as we wanted to remain cool and in the shade as we were taking the dog with us. On previous adventures, we have chosen a destination because of a specific event or end point we needed to get to and worked our adventure around that.
Next we need to choose the vibe. Deciding what type of adventure we want affects how we plan it. Usually we want a chilled out vibe with a mix of hiking, water sports, wild camping and camping, and smaller cities. We want to mix up eating out and cooking in the van and we want to integrate with local people wherever we go.
Then we can get started with the fun bits.
- Google Maps

Once we have decided some general locations we want to visit, we look at how we are going to get there from where we are. That way we can see a basic (but boring) route. From that, we zoom in on some locations to see what’s around. We particularly zoom in on areas of natural beauty or lakes or rivers. We pick a few random town names along the route too to see what landmarks they might have that we may want to see. From this we can build up some kind of route idea. On Google Maps we also create a new List where we drop our pins of interest.
The picture on the right shows a Google Maps route for a previous roadtrip from Brighton to Granada, Spain with a lot of pins on it for cool places to potentially vist.
2. Culture Trip
This website it great for getting initial ideas on where to visit as well as actual specific places to add to your route and itinerary. Admittedly, this website used to be better, but it is still pretty good! You can find some really amazing off the beaten track locations to visit as well as restaurants, hotels. One of my favourite features are their articles about what to do for 48 hours in certain cities.
Culture Trip also has many articles with background information about places too so you can really learn about the culture and location. Here is an article I remember reading ahead of our Lycian Way hike.

3. Atlas Obscura
Another great site to find unique places to visit is Atlas Obscura. It is an online magazine that catalogs unusual and obscure travel destinations via user-generated content. I have been to some really weird but cool places thanks to this map! When I was on my roadtrip to Spain, I ended up going to this ancient oak tree that had two chapels INSIDE of it! It ended up being hollowed out by lightning in the 1600s. It is also the oldest known tree in France (around 900 years old). It was very weird, very cool and something I don’t think I’ll ever forget!

Definitely use the map option on Atlas Obscura so you can again cross reference with your route outline.

4. Komoot
If you know us you KNOW we love hiking! So another thing we do when planning a trip is check out the Komoot hikes in particular areas. Of course, we add some filters otherwise we would have too many to look at. We make sure it is the right length for us, it is a circular hike that starts/ends at a car park and after our Turkish hiking experience we make sure it is marked as easy or intermediate!
Here is an example of how we chose some of our hikes when we did a road trip in Wales with the dog back in 2021.

On top of this, we also use the Route Planner tool too. We zoom in on an area we might be passing through or visiting and each of the little red dots is a highlight someone has recommended. They might be anything from great views, coffee shops, water points, benches or nice paths. Sometimes we then create our own hikes which follow some of these. Below is a snippet of one of our hikes we did with extended family in Winchester. We made sure to go through a lot of the red dots as we knew they’d be places our wider family would enjoy.

5. Park for Night/Search for Sites/Pitch Up
I have bundled these together as they are all used to find somewhere to sleep for the night. Park4Night is ideal to find parkups at pubs that allow you to sleep in your van, or car parks or laybys where it might be safe to sleep if needed. Search for sites, also includes these but contains a lot of campsites too, whereas PitchUp only has campsites on it. All of them work across the UK and Europe so that is really handy for us when we travel. We don’t tend to book accomodation in advance and if we do it is only ever a maximum 48hours and all these sites really allow for that type of travelling.
We definitely value the reviews and photos on each of these sites and we only ever go to places with both. We also usually have a backup location too just in case. We have not had to use this whilst together but on Jes’s Spain roadtrip she had to occasionally use a back up site due to original ones being either too busy or not feeling safe enough.
Below is a screenshot from Park4Night and a variety of parkups near Biarritz, France.

6. Online communities
There are some amazing online communities that give great advice about places to visit and we always utilise the power of the hive mind when planning adventures. Groups such as the Yes Tribe, Adventure Queens, Women with Campervans and the Outdoor Swimming Society are ideal for asking for recommendations for places to visit etc.
I wrote a post in the Yes Tribe asking about multi-day group hikes and got 17 comments all of really useful suggestions!

It’s not all about websites though! There are loads of great books like Wild Swimming UK and local hiking guide books you can use too. We use the swimming book quite a lot but it is restricted to UK only and because we carry everything we take either on our backs or in the van we prefer our answers at the end of our fingertips.