About

We plan the trip so you can go on it

Guysaway publishes complete, replicable plans for a weekend away with your people. Not listicles. Not affiliate bait dressed up as advice. A blueprint here is the whole thing: where to go, what it runs per person, what to pack, what to cook, and which gear earned its place in the truck.

Twenty-three years in

We are not travel writers. We are a few different groups of guys who have been doing this long enough that the trips have numbers instead of names.

The longest one is twenty-three years old. It goes on the calendar before anything else does. It has survived new jobs, new wives, new cities and one pandemic, and nobody has ever had to be talked into coming.

That is what happens when a trip lasts. It stops being a weekend away and becomes a fixed point in the year, the thing everything else gets scheduled around. The jokes compound. An argument that started in year four is still running. A guy who came once, a decade ago, still gets brought up by name.

For the twentieth we had bottle openers forged and engraved with the year it started, because at some point you stop calling it a trip and admit it is an institution.

You cannot buy that, and you cannot start it big. You start it small, with whoever says yes, and then you do not miss a year.

Then there is the fishing crew, and the Vegas crew, and they are not the same people or the same problem. A cabin weekend is a logistics exercise: who cooks, who buys, how much ice. A fishing trip is a gear exercise, and the gear is either right or the day is ruined. Vegas is a budget exercise, and the budget is the part everyone gets wrong.

Jon is on all of them. That is the only reason one site covers all three, and it is why the advice here changes shape depending on which kind of trip you are planning.

What we will and will not claim

Most gear writing is done by people who have never used the gear. So every page here carries one of four labels, and they mean different things: we ran this trip, we used this, we researched this, or we have not tested this yet. Each one prints a plain sentence underneath saying exactly what it entitles you to assume.

When a page says we ran it or used it, the dates, the conditions, and the part that went wrong are in the post. The part that went wrong is usually the useful part. When it says researched, the numbers are real rates we looked up rather than a weekend we lived through, and the page says so at the top rather than in the footer.

How the links work

Nothing here earns us anything yet. We have not been approved by an affiliate program, so every outbound link is a plain one. If that changes, this page and the notice on each article change with it. A commission never buys a spot on a list, and we say so when something we bought turned out to be a mistake.

Prices move. Anything we could not confirm is marked unverified rather than quietly guessed at.

Jon writes it. The crew supplies the mistakes. You get to skip them.