This trip was the first time I had ever had the chance to completely take off for 3 whole months to travel. With that in mind I decided I need to maximize this time to see as much as possible, and utilize resources to the max, to make every turn worth it. This would require making a road trip in a straight line, meaning I would not be turning around to see something we may had missed. Here is how I did this, and the stories leading up to this.
Aside from being a pianist, I am a golfer. I was working part time at a local golf club at this time so I was able to play free golf and make a few extra dollars. To keep my job description short, I usually would have to sit at the curb for members to bring their golf bags and take care of what they need to make their day more enjoyable. This year (early 2017), shortly after New Years, I was sitting on the curb, scrolling through pictures of the world and noticed many of the picture were from North America. I thought to myself…..could a large road trip be achieved to see all these places this year? After all , I have already taken 6 vacations within the last half year with my then girlfriend Ashley.
I considered to think of what it would take, and what I wanted to achieve, and everywhere I would want to go. With very minimal research, I found an incredible amount of places to visit around the country in each state, many that people had never heard of. Places that make a trip memorable….that allow one to take the road less traveled, if you will. I figured with all the places we could see in one time, it would take a minimum of 3 months to see everything (or a majority of everything) in the US and Canada. I started having thoughts of how to save money and budgeting, and what the real costs would be.
Once I realized I could do this, my first step was to talk to my piano venues and my job to let me have the time off. Now, being in Florida we have the benefit of having slow summers which made the idea of a less paid staff during slow times slightly appetizing to my bosses and managers, and when it came to my gigs, I was met with curiosity and excitement for the trip. I had given them almost 6 months in advance notice and they allowed me to leave under the condition I return at a specified date.
Once all angles were achieved I started to think of an exact date to leave and a date to return. I make most of my money on the weekends. So, if I left on a Tuesday and made sure to return by a Friday, I could make the most money before I left. The date agreed upon leaving was May 30th 2017 (a Tuesday), and returning on August 31st 2017 (a Thursday).
Now, this was the easy part. The hard part comes in the trip planning, but since there was such a sense of excitement, it came relatively easy. One thing I did not want to do, was turn around for any reason on account of missing an attraction on the trip. Thus, I needed a way to take all the destinations I wanted and put them into the perfect route, essentially in a straight line. With this I came across an app called Roadtrippers. This proved to be a tremendous asset due to its route planning. It would create the best route once you plugged in each destination. There is a separate blog post about this app, which I strongly recommend you read!
What I did was google search terms such as ‘best places by state’, ‘by country’, ‘secret areas’, and ‘unknown sites’ in each area of the country. This way I obtained the best opinions from travelers and locals that allowed me to know what I wanted to see and not miss out on anything. Once I sorted out the places by state that I deemed to look spectacular and worth the time, I narrowed it down to about 250 locations (I know crazy right…only 250!). These were to be seen over the course of 94 days. These included national parks, forests, and monuments….as well as coastlines, secret natural areas, restaurants, buildings, historical bars, landmarks, and towns.
This took all 6 months to plan, and take it from Ashley….she became tired of me telling her the new updates to the trip everyday, as it took time to create the plan. But nonetheless, we created it and finalized it a month prior to leaving. This allowed us to finish our last but most important steps to planning. What we came up with was ‘The Epic American Adventure’ which was a 29,000 mile route!
Transportation
We are both young at this time ( 27 and 25). We do well for ourselves as young professionals, but in no way did we have the means for large campers, and expenses that come along with that, nor did we have the means to fly everywhere for that long. It became evident that this road trip was going to have to be done with one of our cars, and preferably so, since rental cars would possibly cost us much more per mile and with insurance! Ashley had a 2007 Corolla with 122,000 miles on it at the time of leaving. We figured this would be the best and most reliable car for such an intense trip. And I was right! Though we will talk about this later, the car went through all 27,000 miles without a single issue…..warning lights or engine trouble!
Once we decided on this we put new tires, spark plugs and rear brakes on the Corolla. The total cost of all of this doing the work myself was $400. This was to last us the whole trip and at this point we were ready to go. I knew there would be oil changes involved so I brought an oil drain pan in the car and used it as a reservoir for water while it was not collecting oil. We also brought tools we had from home in the event needed to work on the car. We were not taking any chances, and the spare-tire well in the trunk of the car had ample room to store our tools.
Supplies
So we have confirmed the time, the route, and the car…..what next? Let us talk supplies and budget. Off the top of my head I figured we could afford $100 a day easily, and if we stuck to it we could complete the trip in under $10,000 (split two ways). Though we will talk about this more later, we realized other costs are involved that we had not known about yet, and thus we were prepared to spend up to $20,000 split to enjoy the trip and still have money to both come home to. We planned to leave a large chunk of cash at home so that when we came back no matter what, we wouldn’t starve!
Once this was decided we knew what we had to deal with for our budget in preplanning supplies. These are a list of things we needed to save money for:
Camping supplies
-Tent
– blow up bed and electrical air unit and thermal blankets/pillows
-hiking gear (shoes, hats and sunglasses, backpacks)
-Cooking gear(propane stove, propane canisters, cooking utensils)
-Bear mace, knives, and an ax.
The above gear was bought with efficiency, price, and camping in mind. I didn’t bring what I already owned, but rather bought portable and smaller units to save money and space. The total cost for all gear was about $500. Since we didn’t have a camper we had to be prepared for ultimately anything in the wilderness, including wildlife. This was not done because we COULDN’T but rather DIDN’T want to stay in a hotel. We wanted to spend time in the wildlife for the majority of the trip and experience the outdoors amongst natural beauty. It just so happen to be much cheaper than in the cities.
Friends
As you can expect, we were very excited. I personally get extremely into a project when I have this much ambition and excitement to pursue an opportunity of this magnitude. So it goes without saying that I told everyone what we were doing and I realized if I brought other people along to meet us, we could save money, and make the trip more enjoyable. I will explain how we all saved money, but overall we split the costs and shared the car at various points of this trip. I was able to round up 4 friends who were interested in the Utah and midwest section of the trip. Thus we planned on them flying into Phoenix and Las Vegas on dates that were decided upon. This will be covered later, but later on in the trip we met with friends and family in Montana, Seattle, Victoria BC, Rochester NY, South Dakoda, Michigan, and Sea Island Georgia. This was a huge help with lodging and costs! This alone saved us about $600. This mostly was brought up under the guise of my trip and asking people if they wanted to join. This gave them the opportunity to ask if they would offer you anything. Somewhat reverse psychology, but nonetheless, it was a great addition to have a relief from just the same two people for three months. It added a better layer to the trip, incase we found out (as boyfriend/girlfriend) that we learned to not like each other.
Food
For doing a trip on the cheap, we actually ate very well. Our initial idea was to stay under $100 a day for everything, which included gas, camping, and food primarily. We went to the store whenever we needed food, and generally kept our costs to around $15 a night in meats and vegetables to cook. We also had a duffle bag of all our dried food products/emergency meals/seasonings/ oils/ and cooking materials. So this was another cost of about $100 to have this food with us at all time for emergencies.
Now, Remember how I told you we brought the oil reservoir for changes? And how it served two purposes? Well, we put the pan itself into a trash bag as an interior liner, and then bought a 2.5 gallon water reservoir at the store for only 2$, to which we were able to fill up just about anywhere we camped. This reservoir fit perfectly in the oil pan, and thus any leakage (which was just a few drops over the course of days) was actually kept within the reservoir.
Finally, we were able to bring a 5 gallon cooler that fit snug behind the drivers seat of her Corolla. This barely allowed room for me to fit, but Ashley had plenty of room in the drivers seat. If I were any bigger I would not have been able to drive for long distances due to discomfort. This cooler was perfect, as we would buy ice (or fill up at hotels) everyday needed from the store and keep about two days of fresh food cold. This allowed us to buy food when it was near, vs right before we cook it, as we knew there would be days where we are many miles from any store.
Rent
At the time of this, I was living with my mom as a roommate and we were splitting the mortgage on a condo. However, just because she’s my mom doesn’t mean she gave me a free pass for three months. I had to budget for the three months I was gone. So I had 3 full months of rent payment due to her. However in planning for this, another thing came up…..Ashleys apartment.
During the very beginning….when I was at the golf course thinking about trying this, I called Ashley and asked how long she had left on her apartments lease. It turned out her lease was up in April. Thus I told her not to renew and live with me for a month (since we were to leave in May) to save 4 months of apartment rent on the trip. This was a large factor in determining if we could do this trip successfully. She was able to get off work, and not have rent for herself to pay while we were gone.
The above planning was definitely tiring but in the end you will see that this amount of dedication to making sure we saw as much as we could with our time was absolutely necessary. The good news however is….if you want to do this, I already have the perfect trip drafted for you! Keep reading and enjoy the trip story, information, and pictures. I hope this will help to inspire, and inform you on how to do this trip one day! So without further adieu, let’s get on the road!