Planning a Road Trip to Save Money

 

Back in the summer of 2020 when gas was cheap and roads were empty, a friend and I decided to go on a cross country road trip. You may be concerned that we were flaunting COVID-19 restrictions, which we absolutely were, but over the course of the two weeks I interacted with maybe a dozen people. If I had stayed home I am certain that we would have interacted with more than that in the same time period. Either way, what’s done is done. A screenshot of most of our trip is shown below. There are some missing sections, though. We had issues with our GPS recording app in those sections.

Map of our trip

Now, the big thing to consider when planning a road trip is costs. This trip cost me around $1,070 total. Of that $1,070, around $70 was a speeding ticket, $200 was car repairs, and around $100 was gift shop items. That means that the trip itself was only $700. I could have saved another $100 if needed but staying a place with a shower occasionally available really isn’t optional in my opinion. So, to go on a two-week trip it was around $1400 between the two of us. I looked up how much it would cost to go on a similar trip and, according to ontheluce.com, it cost about $3322. Their trip did not involve transport to the west of the United States, though, so our $1400 total is significantly less than theirs.

We were able to save money in a few areas: accommodations, food, and activities. We spent about $100 on accommodations over the whole two weeks. We spent $30 to camp at a developed camp site, shower, and do laundry about five days in. We also spent $80 to spend a night at a hotel, shower, and do laundry about 12 days in. The other nights we just camped in the wild in a combination of Bureau of Land Management land, National Forest land, and National Park land. These are all free, albeit less comfortable than a hotel. I will go over choosing a safe and comfortable camping spot in a future post.

We saved money on food by bringing supplies to cook all of our own food instead of eating out. We purchased fast food maybe eight times throughout the entire trip, mostly on the heavy driving portions going out west and coming back. We didn’t pay for any activities either, all our entertainment was free. We stopped at a lot of the viewpoints and other tourist attractions that were free. A lot of our time was also spent making our way to a campsite, or more accurately, traveling until we found an acceptable campsite. Some of these campsites were pretty close to the paved road, while others were pretty far from the road. We spent a ton of time off-roading which was free but could have been much more expensive. Being patient and cautious is the most important thing when off-roading. Rushing to get over an obstacle can end in a damaged component or worse, with the effects being amplified the further from town you are. I will cover some off-roading information in a later blog post. I included a couple minutes of dashcam footage from our time near Moab, Utah below for those interested in what off-roading can be.

Video of off-roading near Moab, Utah