When we first planned the road trip to St. Jude, the plan was to rent a MotorGnome and drive it one way from Seattle to Memphis and then drop the MotorGnome off and fly home.
But I soon realized that plan was not going to work after a quick call to the RV place. For starters, the closest place to rent an RV was Tacoma, Washington {not a problem} but since we only wanted to drive the RV one way, the nearest drop off site was TEXAS! Which totally didn’t make sense because by the time we got all the way to Texas, we would have already been half way home.
Then of course there was the sticker shock that RV’s tend to get about 8 miles per gallon of gas. Holy smokes, even if we would have parked the RV in a Walmart parking lot to save on hotel stays, the cost for the rental and gas {and per mileage fee} would have been though the roof.
So what did we do? Well, after some serious number crunching, we decided to go ahead and do a little flying and driving {mostly driving}. But the only problem was, the cost of renting a van or an SUV was ridiculously high. So we took our chances and placed reservations for intermediate vehicles in the hopes of the car rental agency offering us an upgrade for a few bucks more.
And it worked, 2 out of 3 times.
Without going in to too much detail, let’s just say none of us would ever {in a million years} buy a Hyundai Sonata.
Especially if we needed drive to the airport in one with 400 gnomes in the trunk, backseat, and in every available free space in the car. We survived it of course, but next time {will there be a next time?} I’m going to just pay a few bucks more when I make the reservation and get a van. Lesson learned.
Luckily, by the time we made it to Dollywood, we were out of extra gnomes, otherwise I think we may have tried to fill the train with them just so we could have some leg room.
Road trips are adventure, that’s for sure.
~Mavis
Have you ever tried to pinch pennies on a road trip before and had it backfire on you? If so, I’d love to hear about it.
Amanda says
We decided to camp our way through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone for our second anniversary, in June. It snowed almost every afternoon and evening….in June. We could not cook on a fire or camp stove because of the moisture. It was so cold that the plastic on our air mattress froze and cracked. We ended up sleeping on the cold, wet ground in every piece of clothing that we had with us, each wrapped in our own tinfoil emergency blanket. So much for romance on our anniversary trip. The second we got out of Yellowstone, I insisted that we find a hotel and restaurant, which was super-pricey being at the edge of the park.
Vicki Moffitt says
My husband and I are backpackers so when we headed out on a 2-day road trip we opted to just throw some of our backpacking gear in the car & spend the night at a campground along the way. Soooooo we pulled in to the campground & set up our tiny backpacker tent (just large enough for 2 gerbils). Then we hauled out our homemade tuna can trail stove & proceeded to cook our one-pot dinner. As we sat there conversing, we began to notice that other campers seemed to be inordinately interested in us. However, thinking they were just curious about the stove, etc., we continued to mind our own business. Next our neighboring campers at several sites began coming over to offer us food. After about the third attempt to feed us, we realized that they thought we were homeless!!! It gave us a good laugh, but it is also good to know that there are people out there willing to help those in need.
The Prudent Homemaker says
I have a 15-pasenger van, and before that I had a Ford Expedition that seated 8. Our gas mileage on the Explorer was around 11 miles to the gallon (not what their brochure says, but that’s what the vehicle said while we were driving it). The van is not much different; it’s probably closer to the 8mpg. We have a family of 9 and so we needed something larger. The rv may get the same amount of gas mileage as the van, but at least you could park it a few places and only pay to hook up every other night (some places a hook up is around $15 a night). So, a van might not give you better gas mileage over an rv.