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I envy your ability to enjoy driving on long road trips. Most of my long road tripping strategies are just on avoiding annoyances.
I think speeding might only be worth it to avoid getting stuck at long lights on a short drive. I regularly have to take 10-20 minute trips around town. Some of the longer light cycles are five minutes. There might be two or three of these lights on the drive, so making both at the end of the red cycle rather than the beginning might cut your trip time in half. It's also a bunch of luck and if the lights are properly synced up you really just need to go the speed limit (however this makes getting behind a slow driver extra frustrating).
On long trips I like to avoid the packs as much as possible. The larger the speed difference between the passing and cruising lanes the faster the pack will clear. I like to avoid being the cause of the pack cuz I don't like cars being around me. I agree with you that they are dangerous as hell. So if I'm in cruising lane at 5 over the speed limit. And someone is just limping along passing me, I'll drop my speed to five below the limit and it will usually break up the pack, or at least allow it to get around me
For food and staying awake I've noticed that spicy snacks seem best for me as an emergency "stay awake" snack. Caffeine doesn't do much for me. I can have 200ml of caffeine and still fall asleep an hour later.
For entertainment we have an in car video system for the kids in the back, or we will pull out tablets that we only give them for road trips. I have a playlist of music I like. If I go with silence for too long I go a bit stir crazy and get too focused on things outside the car. I usually try and put together a list of topics to talk about with my wife.
We have 750 mile trip and 360 mile trip coming up this summer. The 750 one we will split up into two days with a hotel stop between. With the young kids we have there are so many more breaks and bathroom stops. Eating at mildly interesting places is more fun, since the kids will be entertained by the smallest of things.
Yep, the whole calculus changes with kids, and you have to be much more intentional and disciplined about meals, bathroom breaks, and finding ways to keep them occupied.
I didn't enjoy road tripping before kids either.
It makes some things easier. Looking back on it I don't think I took enough long breaks as an adult on road trips. I could go three hours without any stops, and maybe 6-8 hours with only minor stops. But stopping every 1 or 2 hours just makes the whole driving part far less exhausting. And ya it adds a lot of overall time to the trip. But getting where we are going an hour or two later barely matters in the long-run.
Our kids also legitimately enjoy some of the places we have stopped. Like our first visit to a buccees out in Tennessee. They took pictures with the mascot, ate some really good sandwiches, looked through the thousands of souvenir things they sold, got excited about the bathrooms, bought a buccees shirt, and then took pictures outside next to the buccees statue. They talked about that part of the trip for about half a year afterwards.
Had we been planning the trip I don't think we would have allotted an hour of time to visit a glorified and super sized gas station. But I'm happy we went.
Every company in the world needs to be researching whatever the hell is the secret sauce for buccees, even my completely zero whimsy elderly father loves that place.
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