This trip was amazing. Every day was incredibly full of things to do and see. On the ride home it seemed like we’d only just started and that we’d been on the road forever. The Painted Desert seemed like it was months ago.
Once we crossed back into Florida on I75 from Atlanta, we passed the interchange with I10 – our route out of Florida a month ago. I turned to Aryn and asked, “Want to go again?”
I do.
There’s no place we went that I don’t want to return to and spend a week or two. I’d been saying that, except for Carlsbad, for most of the trip, but thinking now, even Carlsbad would be fun for a week – exploring the other, non-touristy caverns. The ones you need a helmet and lamp to go through.
Then there’s the places we didn’t go … Death Valley, Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Teton, Salt Lake, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi Basin … hell, we skipped all of Colorado. Aryn thought she’d seen mountains after visiting Shenandoah years ago … now she thinks Shasta and Ranier, but she still hasn’t seen a full range of peaks that never thaw.
And that’s all just west of the Mississippi.
Budget & Schedule
So when I got home I downloaded all the transactions from the bank and totaled them up. I’m amazed.
When I was planning, I set the hotel budget based on the lowest price I could find in the different cities for one- and two-star hotels … Motel 6, Super 8, etc. I added 20% for taxes, parking, “resort fees”, etc.
Thanks to BiddingForTravel and Priceline, we stayed in 2.5- and 3-star hotels … Courtyard, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza. The total for hotels was $200 more than I’d budgeted without taxes and other fees and hundreds of dollars less than the total budget for hotel nights.
Several hundred dollars under budget on food, as well, and we ate pretty well. I’d told Aryn we’d be eating all Subway all the time, and there were a few days of that, but we were also able to have some wonderful meals – the crepes in Albuquerque, Fisherman’s Wharf … not to mention Vegas … which I can’t, because what happens at a Vegas buffet stays at the Vegas buffet.
I went over my entertainment budget by $58.91. Well, $57.09 if Aryn would give me back the $1.82 she has left from Mall of America …
But … damn … we did a lot. All the national parks, three shows in Vegas, Monterey Aquarium, horses in San Francisco, kayaking, more horses and rafting, all the things we did in Atlanta, not to mention a shopping spree at Mall of America.
All of the gas charges haven’t cleared yet (they’re still at $1), but it looks like that will be under or very close to the $700 I budgeted. It was originally $600, but I raised it when we added San Francisco and Seattle.
The Mapquest estimate for the trip was 8,000 miles – it wound up being 9,717. This was because of how I put things into Mapquest. Between San Francisco and Seattle, we went to the Lava Beds and Crater Lake, but I put that into Mapquest as just San Francisco to Seattle. Also we stayed an hour north of Seattle and our destination for kayaking was an hour north of that. So there was a lot of driving that wasn’t part of the Mapquest route.
We went over on time too. We were supposed to be back on 7/24, but arrived on 7/27. Since there were three free nights built into the original schedule, that’s six nights over on the schedule. Three were intentional … Austin, Albuquerque, and Vegas had nights added early on. The other three were just because of things taking longer than expected.
Twenty-five states in twenty-four days was a pretty aggressive schedule to begin with, though, so stretching it to twenty-nine days isn’t too bad.
