John and I had an amazing seven-week road trip across the
country. We drove 6,296 miles, passed
through 19 states, stayed in and explored 11 states, and only ended up needing
one oil change. Here is a summary of
some tips if you’d ever like to plan your own road trip and how we went about
cutting costs on ours.
Speedometer before and after!
First off, if you are going to plan a road trip, know who
you are going with. This may seem pretty
straight-forward, but now having completed the road trip, I know there is no
other person on earth (no matter how much I love you), besides John, that I
would have been able stand for seven weeks.
Surprisingly John and I didn’t even get into any arguments! That’s not saying that we didn’t get on each
other’s nerves, believe me, we did. I’m
just saying that if you are going to spend seven weeks with someone – day and
night, literally no escape (haha), and have to kill endless hours in the car,
some legs of the journey being twelve to thirteen hours, you have to really, REALLY
enjoy that person’s company. Seven weeks
is a long time with no alone time. (I
repeat, NO alone time). I can imagine
that 95% of the people I know would have gotten on my nerves after week
one. Also, you may think that the best
person to share the trip with would be your significant other – Do NOT make a
seven week trip with your significant other if your thoughts while planning it
are “I hope we don’t kill each other!”
If that is your thought process, you probably will, and one of you will
end up burying the other in the middle of the barren Texas desert.
That being said, here
is my first rule of the road: Choose your road trip companion(s) carefully.
On our trip we drove through the following states: New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California.
The reason we drove through all of these states is because we wanted to
visit the following cities: Fairport, NY; Paramus, NJ; New York, NY; Wake
Forest and Durham, NC; Jacksonville, FL; Miami, FL; South Beach, FL; New
Orleans, LA; Fort Worth, NC; Santa Fe, NM;
Phoenix, AZ; Sedona, AZ.; Grand Canyon, AZ; Bryce Canyon, UT; Zion National
Park, UT; Las Vegas, NV; and San Diego, CA.
There are definitely more direct routes to San Diego from Buffalo, but
John and I wanted to go to Miami for Ultra, and we chose to stick to southern
cities because of the time of year.
Consider the time of year during your planning because for us, we had
almost perfect weather the whole time.
If we were to take the same trip in August, we wouldn’t have mapped the
same route because many cities like New Orleans, Phoenix, and Las Vegas would
have had temperatures in the hundreds rather than
mid-seventies/low-eighties.
Rule number two is: Plan your trip carefully and consider
the time of year while doing so.
Rule three: Make the trip in a reliable vehicle
Thankfully, “Margarita”, my trusty Honda accord was the
perfect travel vehicle for us. This rule
is pretty straightforward. Don’t make
the trip in your giant Ford truck that gets less than ten miles to the
gallon. Don’t embark in a Geo Prism that
has two hundred thousand miles on it. Do
not leave in a car that has its check engine light on. Simply be smart. Make the trip in a reliable vehicle and get
any necessary work done prior to leaving.
That means you’ll want to get the car completely checked over, get an oil
change, check your fluids, replace the filters, etc. Also pack extra oil with you in the car,
don’t let the gas tank get too low, and always have water, snacks, and a
blanket easily accessible – just in case.
Rule four: Consider all costs BEFORE leaving
John and I had a LOT of money saved up before this move,
which is why we even considered making this road trip. Definitely over-estimate your costs before
you leave. You don’t want to be four
weeks into the seven and run out of funds.
Overall, we spent a grand total of $7,552. That includes Gas and Tolls, Hotels, Food,
Tickets to shows, and “others”. All the
amounts are the totals – we split everything 50/50. Also that amount does not include what we
lost in Vegas, but that’s classified (don’t worry, it wasn’t too much, but it
doesn’t affect the costs that matter to you). Below is a breakdown of our costs
and tips for each category.
Hotels: We spent $3,041 on lodging.
It is easy to spend a TON of money on hotels, and for us, it
was our highest expense.
If you think
about it, the cheapest, seediest hotel could be over $100 in a big city.
We were fortunate enough to have been able to
stay with friends and family for half of our trip.
The equivalent of 3.5 weeks worth of nights
were spent staying in locations that we didn’t have to pay for.
Another HUGE THANK YOU to all that showed us
their hospitality!
Definitely plan some
road trip stops based on where you know people.
Not only is it convenient to not have to pay for hotels in those locations,
it is also really fun to be able to hang out with those you are staying with
and have them show you around their city!
Other ways that you can go about saving money in the lodging
department is to PLAN AHEAD! We booked
all of our hotels in advance once we had the tentative dates that we wanted to
be in each city. We searched for any
deals we could find – within the cities that we wanted, and for stops that were
just overnight to break up a long drive, we looked for the cheapest location
with good ratings. Definitely CHECK THE
RATINGS online. Now there are so many
resources available to us, so check all your hotels online before you
book. We stayed in some awesome $70
hotels, but checked the ratings beforehand to know we wouldn’t be lugging all
of our belongings into a dump.
Also, when planning, use alternative methods for booking
hotels – we used airbnb.com for a lot of our stops. If you are staying somewhere for more than
one or two nights, look into Airbnb!
Airbnb.com (and another is HomeAway.com) is a website where people rent
out their apartments and it’s similar to a hotel where you would book your
stay, but it’s a great way to save money because full apartments, usually
including a kitchen where you can cook your own meals to once again save money,
tend to be way less expensive than a hotel rate. For instance, in Sedona, hotels were priced
around $200/night, where on Airbnb we were able to find a full studio with a
kitchen in a gorgeous neighborhood for $45/night. I always check Airbnb first before looking
into hotels.
Also, check deal sites such as Groupon! Once we had our cities picked out, I
monitored Groupon and Living Social, checking every day to see if there were
any new deals in the cities that we had chosen.
From my experience, call the hotel and tell them that you are thinking
of buying the Groupon and then check if they have your specific dates
available. If they do, go ahead and buy
the Groupon! We were able to stay two
nights in Santa Fe at a GREAT hotel with amazing continental breakfast for
$100!! For two nights! It was an awesome 50% off deal!
Basically, to save as much money on hotels as possible: Look
at Airbnb first, check deal sites such as Groupon and Living Social, and plan
ahead so you are able to book everything in advance!
Food: $1718
Food was our second highest expense category, because
obviously, there’s no way to avoid eating.
But still, there are ways to cut expenses in this category. If you think of how many days are in seven
weeks, (almost fifty for those of you a little slower in math), spending $1718
on food is not bad at all. That’s
roughly $34.36 a day – for both of us (only $17.18 each per day)!
The first way to save would be to try and eat out as little
as possible. John and I did a TON of
eating out, at least one meal a day.
But, if your hotel room has a mini-fridge and no continental breakfast,
grab yogurts at a gas station and stick them in there the night before. John and I bought some disposable cereal
bowls and spoons early on in our trip and had cereal many mornings. Cereal is great because all you need is a
small container of milk (that every gas station sells) and a big box of cereal
that can travel with you from stop to stop.
It is really easy to save by just cutting out one easy meal during the
day. If your hotel has a continental
breakfast, obviously utilize that. Even
if it’s a pretty crappy breakfast, you can always get some basic cheerios or a
slightly stale muffin. And breakfast is
a great meal to skip going to a restaurant for – unless the place is widely
known for its eggs benedict or something, all breakfast food is pretty similar
and not worth spending the extra $20.
If you book an Airbnb location instead of a hotel, and the
apartment or studio that you rent has a kitchen, this is a GREAT way to save
money! We were in New Orleans for five
days, and were able to try some AMAZING restaurants, but we did try to restrict
ourselves to one meal out a day to save on the cost of food. Some days when we were out and about we
obviously ate two meals out and enjoyed every minute of it. But a couple of nights we bought a cheap
bottle of wine and made some pasta for a meal under $10. Booking an Airbnb location with a kitchen is
an awesome idea to save some of your budget.
Another way that John and I saved a lot of money on food was
by using phone apps like Yelp or Travelocity.
We also utilized large city’s Reddit pages to find local hot spots. We probably ate less than ten meals that were
over $50. We used apps like Yelp to find
hole-in-the-wall places that had decent ratings with a high number of comments
to try the good, local eats. This method
turned out to be incredibly successful because for about $20, you could usually
get a delicious dinner for two and be able to try local favorites. One of our favorite places to do this was in
New Orleans, where we were able to order several different small items for
about $5 each, and share, being able to try 3-4 items in one meal. It was great!
If you plan a road trip and travel to any of the cities that we went to,
look back at what I wrote about our meals.
All of the good restaurants that we ate at I wrote about.
To summarize how to save as much money as possible on food,
eat at your hotel or Airbnb location if possible, utilize any continental
breakfast available, and try the local spots!
Try and avoid touristy locations that are typically overpriced and often
not as good.
Our third largest expense was tickets. We spent $1069 on four different
shows/festivals: Book of Mormon, Ultra Music Festival, Blue Man Group, and the
LA Comedy Club.
You can easily eliminate
this category as a way to save money if you are trying to do your trip on a
tight budget.
Obviously if we had not
attended Ultra, we could have automatically saved nearly $800 on the tickets
alone.
So when choosing what you want to
do on the trip, you can use your discretion when deciding what you want to see
in regards to shows.
You can always
research ahead of time to get an idea of how much tickets are going to cost
you.
A tip for Las Vegas is to wait to
buy tickets for shows such as the LA Comedy club until you get there.
If you have never been to Las Vegas, you
wouldn’t know that there are 50% off ticket stands all over the strip for shows
that are for that night.
Even though our
comedy tickets were supposed to be about $40 each, we were able to get them for
half the price the day of at one of these ticket booths.
Thankfully a coworker shared this tid-bit
with me before we left Buffalo, and his advice was very valuable!
Gas did not cost us nearly as much as I would have
thought. From Buffalo to San Diego we
only spent $837 on gas and $131 on tolls.
A total of $968 got us all the
way across the country. It may seem like
a lot of money to some, but if you think about how much two round trip airplane
tickets are, it would be around that price – and that’s to and from just one
location. Especially if you were flying
from the Buffalo airport and most definitely had a layover. I was surprised by how little gas cost,
because I would have thought it was going to be one of our pricier expenses. Granted, I do drive a Honda that gets good
gas mileage, but that just reinforces rule number three: make the trip in a
reliable vehicle.
As for tolls, once you get out of New York, there really
aren’t that many. There were a couple
driving through New Jersey and down to North Carolina, but from North Carolina
there weren’t any tolls until we reached Florida. And from what I can remember, there were no
tolls after we left Florida. So once you
are out of New York, the tolls get much more sparse.
Our final cost category was labeled “other”. We spent $756 on these random costs, which
encompassed everything that didn’t qualify as food, hotels, gas, tolls, or
tickets. It included costs such as
souvenirs, museum or exhibit entrance fees, parking, Laundromat costs, drinks,
our oil change, John’s mid-trip haircut, cab fares, bellman tips, and even
includes the $10 shirt that I bought one night in Las Vegas when I was too
cold. Although each item purchased in
this category was usually pretty cheap, this cost area does add up, so
definitely have enough money on hand for the random costs that you incur that
you might not think about when you originally plan your trip.
I hope that these tips and cost summaries will help you if
you ever decide to plan a similar trip.
Our journey was nothing short of amazing and an incredible learning
experience. I wouldn’t change anything
about the last seven weeks (except for maybe the gross dinner that cost us $50
in the Grand Canyon), but besides that, I have absolutely no regrets.
John and I are so excited to be getting settled into our
studio, and we hope that you decide to take a road trip out to visit us using
some of the tips outlined above!
If you
want to plan a trip or are wondering what would be the best places to see, ASK
US!
We’d love to share info on anywhere
we’ve been, offer any advice we can give, and help in any way possible.
If we are able to host you on any part of
your journey, please do not hesitate to ask.
We were fortunate enough to have friends and family hospitably host us,
and we would love to do the same!
Also,
if you are thinking about a visit, we took the road trip from San Diego to San
Francisco last summer and highly recommend making that trip!
It can be done comfortably (but quickly) in
seven to nine days.
I have all our info
from that trip as well if you need some tips or a travel guide.
And if you are considering quitting your job and moving somewhere else, as long as you have sufficient funds saved up in advance, I say DO IT!
I can’t wait to continue sharing our experiences with you in
the future. If you have read this whole
“tips for the road trip” extensive information guide, first of all kudos, and
second of all please continue checking up on the blog! I am definitely going to keep blogging and
keeping you all updated on our lives!
Hopefully soon I’ll be able to report on job leads! Thanks for reading!
We’ve been in San Diego one week today! It has been a glorious week of gorgeous
weather, getting settled in, and exploring our new surroundings! We have also been eating some really great
food! The produce here is amazing – so
many fresh fruits and veges, I’m in heaven!
It’s nice to finally be able to cook when we want to with our little
kitchen. We’ve also been exploring some
more of the local spots, and have tried Mexican, Brazilian, and a delicious
café since I last wrote a post. We’re
scoping out some good spots to take our first visitors (that and the weather
should be incentive enough)!
Today John and I went to Little Italy, where an art fair was
taking place. We had a delicious lunch,
walked around the fair, and then walked down by the water to the port. It has been so amazing here for the past
week, and we are so excited for the weeks to come!
