Our Cross Country Road Trip Itinerary

Planning a cross country road trip? I’m sharing our road trip itinerary traveling from Los Angeles, California to Washington, DC!

Let me tell you something, I never planned on doing a cross country road trip the week before Christmas in a pandemic. But, sometimes you don’t really get a choice in the matter. Because of the logistics of our temporary military move to Washington, D.C., we chose to fly in Los Angeles with both our dogs, then drive from Los Angeles across the country. Today, I’m sharing all the details!

Cross Country Road Trip Itinerary From Los Angeles to Washington, DC

We left on a flight out of Honolulu at 7AM on a Monday, and arrived in Los Angeles at 3PM. By 5PM, we had our rental car, and were headed to our first hotel of the trip. We stayed the night in LA, and headed out early Tuesday morning.

It’s worth noting that Dane and I wanted to do the trip in a week or less, and we spent very minimal time in each spot exploring. This was for a few reasons: 1. Our car rental was a limited number of days 2. The holiday was coming up and 3. We wanted to minimize our exposure to COVID as much as possible.

We rented a Yukon and it fit all four of us (two humans and two large dogs), along with six large suitcases, very comfortably. We had plenty of room and I would 10/10 go that route again. We picked up the car at LAX and returned it on the east coast. Aside from being a bit of an investment, it was all very easy.

Cross Country Road Trip Planner

Admittedly, Dane planned all of our stops along the way. He’s an expert road trip planner! We opted to stop in Sedona, Amarillo, Memphis, and Knoxville, before driving into D.C. on the final day.

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Cross Country Road Trip Map

I was super nervous with how the dogs would do, but they shocked both of us by being so well-behaved and laying down in the center section of seats. Some of our days were really long, but we had mostly good weather, which was another thing we worried about. The only “bad” weather we got was fog and rain through Tennessee.