TripHip - Travel Tips and Advice for Traveling on a Budget

Stay safe during your road trip, and don't get distracted by your cell phone, PDA, Blackberry or even the GPS. You should NOT be texting, dialing, or any other kind of button-pushing while you are driving. You can change the radio station, but that's it.

This can be especially dangerous if you've already been driving for 8 hours straight, and in an unfamiliar area. Watch the road and concentrate on your driving at all times.

If you must use a GPS, do all the programming before you start your driving for the day. And try to let your passenger help you with the directions, so you don't have to keep watching the screen to see where you are going.

Want to try something a bit different when on vacation? Try some geocaching. If you have a hand-held GPS unit, that's all you need to try this fun hobby.

Visit www.geocaching.com for all the details. It's basically a world-wide GPS treasure-hunt game. People hide "caches" around their hometowns and record the coordinates on that website. Then you take the coordinates, and see if you can find their cache.

Caches are usually hidden in parks and on walking trails. I've seen all kinds of fun places that aren't in a tour book by looking for caches. A cache usually has small prizes inside, and you're suppose to take something and leave something new behind. Bring along some mementos from your own hometown if you plan on trying this game.

While geocaching is available around the world, the most caches are in the United States, Canada and some parts of Europe.