Choose a surprise destination for our upcoming road trip!

We’re going to take a surprise destination road trip from April 12-14, 2019.

Wait, what do you mean by surprise?

Jen and I want you (or someone like you) to help choose a surprise destination for our April road trip. We won’t know where we are headed until a random number generator chooses a suggestion from the entires you and others have submitted. Having already packed before the selection, we just get in the car and go, planning out the trip as we go.

The process

Use the Google Form below to submit an entry that follows the important rules outlined below before we leave on April 12.

On April 12, we’ll pack our car for the trip. We’ll log into the form, find out how many entries there are, and then use a random number generator to pick a number for us. We’ll use that number to select the corresponding entry. If the entry meets the rules listed below, that will be our required destination. If it doesn’t meet our rules or is otherwise invalid, we’ll simply discard it and pick another random number. Once we learn where our destination is, we’ll hop in the car, hit the open road, and plan the trip as we go.

Obviously, we’ll likely add some additional stops on our itinerary, based on our prior knowledge and our after-the-surprise trip planning, but we’ll make sure to at least visit the selected destination. If the destination is boring or not fun, we won’t stay long and will simply move along to find something better. After all, we take road trips to have fun.

Follow #SurpriseUsRoadTrip on twitter or my stories on instagram for more updates, including during the road trip itself.

The rules

We’re placing some limitations on the suggestions. If your entry doesn’t meet all of these requirements, it’ll be disqualified and we will have to randomly select another entry. You can submit multiple entries.

Destinations must:

• be within 6 hours of driving time from Phoenix (calculated by Google Maps)
• be accessible by car (or easily accessible on foot—no submitting destinations that require difficult hikes, paddles, climbs, etc)
• be legally accessible without a permit or reservation
• not be located in Mexico
• be places we can safely drive to (and out of!) in my Subaru Outback without any consternation (in short, don’t send us someplace that requires high clearance or 4WD driving skills)
• not be impacted by things like flooding, wildfire, safety concerns, shitty beer, etc. (ok fine, we might go to places with shitty beer, but only because we’ve already packed our own)
• not be an inappropriate place for us to visit publicly (eg, no underground sex club, random person’s house, opium den, MAGA rally, etc)

Why are we doing this?

For fun!

We’re also believers in the idea that you can have fun on nearly any trip, and this is a way to test that theory out. Let’s see if we do!

And if we do…

If we enjoy this, we’ll likely do another one next year that involves flying somewhere and doing a surprise roadtrip from there (maybe we’ll have two rounds and even let you choose the city we fly to). After that, we’re tentatively planning a “dice” trip, where we fly into some European city, roll some dice, and let it choose our path for us. For instance, first roll of the dice determines which train platform, second roll determines how many stops we’ll go before getting off. Or some similarly random way of selecting destinations. We’ll continue to repeat this until we have to make our way back to the airport to fly home.

Here’s the form to submit for entries.

If you can’t see the embedded form below, you can find it here instead.

Thanks for participating! Feel free to submit more entries. 🙂