Seeing the Great American West in a rented RV
My wife Denise and I love to travel. We’ve done a lot of it together, and we learn a little something with every trip. We learn about America, we learn about each other and we learn about traveling. This Spring was no exception.
Allow me to back up for just a minute. Last Spring our trip took us to The Colorado Rockies. We wanted to have a loosely planned trip to allow for maximum spontaneity. So we bought round-trip tickets to Denver and reserved a rental car. That was it. From the time we landed in Denver, the entire trip was improvised. For a week, we drove to what we wanted to see next, then stayed as long as we wanted before moving on.
It was almost a perfect vacation. There was only one thing we would have changed. We had to go back to Denver to fly out. Not that Denver’s not a great place, but with only a week of vacation, we wanted to see something new every day, and having to backtrack to catch a flight wasn’t much fun.
This year, we wanted to fix that. We decided to pick a range of places we wanted to see, find a start point and an end point and book one-way flights to one and from the other. Then we would rent a car and take a route between the two that would let us see the most for the mileage.
As we were pricing things, the flights weren’t prohibitively expensive, but the car rental was going to take a big bite out of the budget. We were seeing rates of $95 a day for one-way rentals. We figured that, plus mileage, gasoline, hotels and meals…we’re really starting to get in over our heads. Then Denise said “Check on RV rentals.”
I did.
I found that we could rent a 25-foot motor home for only $100 a day from CruiseAmerica. We would still pay mileage and fuel, but a decent $200 a night hotel could now be a $25-$30 a night campground, and three restaurant meals a day with an average cost of $25 each could now be $15 a day in groceries that we would cook ourselves right there in the RV. We started to get really excited.
Limitations on pick up and drop off locations for the RVs dictated that we would fly into Portland, Oregon and fly home from Phoenix, Arizona. But the rest of our trip was up to us!
We have a smart phone app called RV Parky that lets us search for campgrounds based on location and what amenities we wanted. Our first night was spent in Washington State on the Pacific Ocean.
Denise and I are experienced campers, but had never used a motor home before. It was easy. Driving the larger vehicle took a little getting used to…but by day two, we were old hands at it. Hooking up to city water, sewer and electricity took all of 10 minutes per night.
And cooking in the RV was a piece of cake. A two-burner stove and rented pots and pans…the gas/electric refrigerator kept our food fresh even when between campgrounds. Hungry on the road? Fix a sandwich on the run.
If one of us needed to go to the bathroom, no pulling off and wasting time…just go to the back of the camper. And no lugging luggage into and out of a hotel. We put our clothes in the wardrobe and never saw our luggage again till we were packing up for the flight home.
During our twelve days we crossed Washington state visiting Mount Rainier National Park first, buying a National Park annual pass there. The $80 investment would pay for itself after only three national parks.
We visited a friend in Idaho, rolled down to Yellowstone National Park, visited Salt Lake City and the Mormon Tabernacle, Arches National Park, The Grand Canyon, and the Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona and a hundred places in-between…all the while seeing even more of the national landscape by sleeping near nature instead of a stuffy hotel room.
We would sit out by the campfire and commiserate with other travelers at night, see the local wildlife and breathe the fresh air at every stop. No backtracking, every day was a new adventure.
And best of all, even accounting for souvenirs, we spent 30 percent less than if we had booked a traditional trip and had 100 percent more fun.