My Experience Planning Road Trips, and a Hobby Tool

I have been driving a fair bit throughout India over the years. I love exploring hidden historical sites, mostly places I come across while reading history books as a hobby, the kind that aren't easily reachable by public transport. I try to plan long, multi-day routes that cover interesting places along the way, experiencing the culture, food, and scenery that shifts with every hundred kilometres (or at least at the night halt).

Over the years, this has become my preferred way to travel. I've built up a decent amount of experience planning these trips, from quick getaways to multi-week drives. Some of my recent ones:

• A 14-day loop through central India: Bangalore → Aurangabad → Maheshwar → Ujjain → Agra → Gwalior → Hampi → Bangalore.
• A 10-day coastal drive up the east: Bangalore → Vizag → Puri → Kolkata → Bhubaneswar → Bangalore.
• A 9-day drive to ancient history: Bangalore → Pune → Surat → Vadodara → Lothal → Bangalore.
• A 6-day run down south: Bangalore → Kanyakumari → Varkala → Kochi → Bangalore.

How I Plan My Road Trips

I'd like to write down how I go about planning, since it has been useful to my friends and family many a time. To mention a few things I typically do, the final decision is always more extensive, but these are some of the key parts:

Before finalising a route, a quick check on Google Street View helps get an idea of the road width, whether it's a divided highway or a narrow single lane. Small thing, but useful.

Stops matter just as much as the route. Preferring stops on the left side of the road helps, avoids unnecessary U-turns on a highway. For fuel, I almost exclusively look for COCO (Company Owned, Company Operated) petrol pumps, they're reliable, well-maintained, and you don't have to worry about fuel quality. For food and rest, I look for places with parking, clean washrooms, and decent food. These things sound basic, but anyone who has driven long distances in India knows how hard they can be to find consistently. I try to dedicate enough time to researching all of this before every trip.

From Personal Notes to a Public Tool

A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to build a tool that would help me plan trips with just a start and destination, using my own criteria. The result is trails.rakeshr.net — a drive planner built on top of Google Maps APIs, designed around the way I actually plan my routes and stops.

Here's an example — a Bangalore to Goa trip. It picked a route via NH, bypassed Dharwad, Davangere, Chitradurga, and Tumkur, and found 3 stops along the 652 km route with veg restaurants, clean washrooms, and parking:

Bangalore to Goa Baga beach, 652 km, ~12h 34m. 3 stops found: Halli Mane, Bhavani Dhaba, and GOAN ZAIKA family restaurant.

Zoomed in on stop 2 — Bhavani Dhaba near Bankapura, right on the highway. Each stop shows break timing, distance, review summary, and matched criteria.

Under the Hood

A few technical details for those interested:

• Framework: Next.js 14 with @vis.gl/react-google-maps for the map interface.
• Smart Routing: Uses the Google Routes API to compute routes. It can prefer highways over smaller roads, and automatically find city bypasses — routing you around places like Pune or Hubli if the detour adds less than 20 minutes or 30 km.
• Stop Selection: This is the part I'm most happy with. The tool uses Groq (running Llama 3.1) to actually read Google reviews of places along the route and score them against criteria like "Clean Washrooms," "Safe at Night," or "Good Veg Options." So instead of just relying on star ratings, it tries to understand what people are actually saying about a place.

The tool finds the best route based on your preferences, reads through reviews of potential stops, scores and ranks them, and gives you a shareable Google Maps link for the whole trip.

I'm already thinking about a Phase 2, using Google Street View images with Gemini Vision to automatically flag road condition along the route. That would automate the one part of my planning that's still manual.

I built this for my own need. It's still early, and there are things I want to improve in my free time, but it already does what I needed, takes a start point, a destination, and gives me a route and stops I can trust. If you drive long distances and care about the quality of your stops, give it a try.