Many weeks worth of evenings went into preparing for our trip. It began in earnest just before Christmas 2017, when we told the kids that our big family gift for the year would be a trip to see some of the National Parks out west.
The flights were the first (and really only) major expense. I remember taking a similar trip with my family when I was a teenager, and I remember the $100 round trip ticket price for flights from Boston to Las Vegas. I had sticker shock after we stopped at a travel agent to get the best deal on flights. I had assumed that travel agents knew how to find the best deals, but we could not afford the rates that we were getting. We did some research at home over the next couple of days and wound up settling on a carrier that had a direct flight from Cleveland to Las Vegas. We joined the airline’s discount program for one year at a cost of $40, and that wound up saving us over $600 on our family’s round trip!
While we were sure we wanted to hit some of the major Southwest National Parks, we considered several options as far as how to get there and how to get from point to point. We were very quickly able to rule out the option of driving our own trailer out, since the time required to get there and then to get back would take up the entire Spring Break by itself, not even counting any stops at interesting locations along the way!
Since we love the RV life, we thought that the next best thing to driving our own truck and trailer out there would be to rent an RV once we arrived. I did find a good deal on a rental, and locked that reservation in as I continued to budget and weigh the RV option against one other option – renting a car and staying at motels.
While it was close, the car and motel option won out for a couple of reasons.
- Overnight cost – while the cost of the campsite itself was cheaper than a hotel room, it was the daily vehicle rental rate of the RV versus the car that made the car a much more economical option overall.
- Advantages of a car – besides the rental cost advantage of a car over an RV, there is also the fuel economy to consider. The RV would have a range of about 400 miles on a 40+ gallon tank of fuel. The rental car that we wound up with did much better than I had projected, getting a 600 mile range on a 14 gallon tank of fuel. One final advantage to having the car was having the ability to explore side roads, downtown areas, and other places where getting a 26-foot truck in and out would have been challenging, if not impossible!
- Unstocked RV – the RV rental was JUST for the RV. We would have had to also rent the items that we would need for food prep and place settings, as well as bedding, towels, and disposable items (such as soap RV-compatible toilet paper).
- Breakfast – we are part of a loyalty program with a particular chain of hotels, and in addition to the rewards that we were earning for our 2 weeks of staying with them, every morning we had a nice hot breakfast to start our day with. Not having to eat breakfast out saved us at least $30 each day.
Since our family began our habit of intentional eating last October, a big challenge was how we were going to handle that out on the road. We used our food budget and put together a list of groceries that we ordered on-line and had scheduled for us to pick up at Wal-Mart in Henderson, Nevada. The convenience of the grocery pickup service was invaluable to us, we had our order and were on the road within 10 minutes. If we had to do all of that shopping in an unfamiliar store, we could have easily been there for a couple of hours.
We stored our perishable items in a soft-sided cooler that we brought with us. We refilled the cooler with ice every morning. To help the ice last longer as we were driving around, we also froze some of our disposable water bottles every night, and put them in the cooler each morning.