Road trips, donthey make sense after all?

[johninvegas]

I look at road trips as a trip for everything between point A and point B. If I'm in a hurry, then I fly. But if I have the time, seeing everything in between is the fun part.

[StealthRabbit]

TIME.... how much time do you have.?....
if you are employed and using your precious vacation time... go Fast (and during the night) to your destination.. enjoy the beach!

Another option for that route is the “auto - train”. Tho not fast or cheap.

I seldom take my personal car on road trips, $10. -$20/ day it is plenty cheap to rent a new car. (I fly between destinations), I do miss my 50mpg when renting, But I can milk 40+ mpg out of a Focus while in USA. Elsewhere I rent 50 mpg diesel cars.

Time.... do an accurate estimate of driving that route. You might have very little time to spend on the beach

[Blondebaerde]

Originally Posted by TLC1957

It depends....this from a person who has been to all 50 states....everything west of the Mississippi River we fly to and rent a car, everything else we drove to. But we just got back from a trip where we drove from Philadelphia to Phoenix stayed for 2 months and drove back....5 days going out 4 days coming back....all long days of 12 hours of driving..... On our trips out west we would fly to say Denver and put 3000 miles on a rental visiting the adjacent states. The USA is an absolutely beautiful country get out and explore the west is amazing.

My dad, on retiring (forced, with pension that wasn't half-bad, at age 60) and the untimely passing of my mom when he was 62 made him a road-tripping fiend. He always loved to drive anyway. He lived in Michigan.

Some of us, namely me...No. 1 Son, as he called me...saw west of Dodge City KS (where "the West" begins, according to one Old Saw) as kids and decided we needed to live there forever. So, I did. I could live my whole life never again east of St. Louis...the Furthest West Eastern City...rest of my life. As I write from Fayetteville, Arkansas, on business: not a half-bad place, if I do say so. Hadn't been here before, goes to show there is much to see in the U.S.

There is no shortage of things to see out West. I drove constantly in my 20s for work in CA and Nevada in-particular. I've been to far-flung corners of each you people almost cannot imagine, especially Nevada which is a trippy state indeed and there are places so desolately beautiful and terrifyingly remote, accessible by ATV or on-foot only, I'd probably not go again unarmed personally... but that's how I roll. Not for the critters, rather the wackos... of which there are a few.

Never mind. I will live remainder of my life out West and never see it all. In a few years I'm going to start roving it like my dad did, when he visited me, God willing, staying here and there somewhat unlike him in that I think a few months on the road (vs. his several week trips) sounds more interesting, probably in a van conversion in my case.

The above is appropo of nothing, but just affirming the quoted. The only places I've seen to rival the western U.S. are one, Western Cape South Africa and two, the entire country of Namibia below the Caprivi. The rest of SA can suck a lemon. Those two, though, would take three more lifetimes and are so alien to the U.S. I'm not even going there, but so madly ancient and stark as to take your breath away every...single...instant. And I toured them on a BMW motorcycle, sucking up that billion year old dust on gravel roads every day for a month couple years ago. Wow. That will take a lot out of a man, though, making me wish I'd be born 10x as rich and didn't need to work so I could do it all day long.