Memory runs out around stop ten.

Thirty parkups all want the same shelf

The first few nights of a trip stay sharp for years. After that, they blur. By the third week you can remember that there was a brilliant free parkup somewhere between Ullapool and Durness, with the flat gravel and the otter at dusk, but not which turning it was, and the three candidates on the map all look identical from a satellite photo. Psychologists call it interference: similar memories overwrite each other, and nothing generates similar memories quite like thirty nights of gravel, water taps and sunsets. You don't have a memory problem. You have thirty parkups that all wanted the same shelf in your head.

The fix is boring and it works: capture the facts at the stop, while you're stood in them.

What's worth writing down at the stop

The test for what to record is simple. Would this change a decision next time? Four things always pass:

• Exactly where it is. Not the village. The spot. A GPS pin marks the actual entrance, which matters when the right turning is an unmarked gap in a hedge 400 metres before the sign.
• What the pitch was actually like. How level it was, road noise at 3am, whether your phone had signal. These are the things photos never show and the things you most want to know at 6pm on a return visit. Score them, don't essay them.
• What it cost. The pitch, the fuel on the way in, the toll, the honesty box. Costs evaporate from memory fastest of all, and they're the raw material for knowing what a month on the road genuinely costs you.
• Levels. Fresh water, waste, cassette, gas, battery on arrival and departure. Two trips' worth of that data tells you your real range between service stops, which is the number that decides whether you can take the long way round the peninsula.

Four things, while the kettle heats. Keep the list that short and the habit survives the fortnight; make it a chore and you'll have abandoned it by day four, and a log you abandon is worth less than no log at all.

What's a waste of effort

Long prose entries, mostly. "Lovely evening, beautiful views, great spot" is the kind of sentence that feels like logging and tells future-you precisely nothing: every spot you bothered to write about had views. Skip anything a map already knows, skip the play-by-play of the driving day, and skip duplicating what your camera roll does better. One useful line beats a page of scenery description: "levelling ramps essential, bakery van comes at 9, don't trust the bins." That's a note with a job.

Paper or app

Paper works, and there's a case for it: no battery, no updates, pleasant to fill in with a coffee, and a shelf of finished logbooks is a genuinely nice object. The Road Trip Adventure Log is our paper answer: structured pages, one spread per stop, and it's the book this whole project grew out of. What paper can't do is arithmetic or search. It won't total a trip's fuel, plot your stops on a map, or find "that level spot with signal near Applecross" without you leafing for it.

That's the job Stops & Stays was built for: the same habit, but the pin, the scores, the costs and the levels go in structured, so they come back out as a searchable history, every stop on a map, and what the trip cost, added up without you adding it. It works with no signal at all, because the places worth logging are reliably the places with none.

The second-season payoff

A trip log feels like admin in year one. In year two it becomes the best planning tool you own. Routes get built from your own verified stops instead of strangers' reviews; budgets come from what last May cost rather than a guess; and the water-range number tells you which detours are on. Other people's recommendations tell you where they had a good night. Your log knows where you did, in your own van. Start it on the next trip, not the perfect one. Ten stops in, you'll have the habit; a season in, you'll have the archive.