Roadtripping Across the US pt.1
- Ryan Atkins
- Oct 22, 2021
- 6 min read
The start of a crazy adventure
2021, a year long-awaited by many. A year that brought hope, a time for change, healing, and returning to our everyday lives. No more fear, or at least less fear, of what is to come and what awaits us outside the comfort of our own homes which we have been stuck inside for the past year. And for us Adventure Seekers, it is a time for us to finally leave behind our hometowns and the places we have been hiding in throughout the pandemic to finally return to our dreams of seeing the world.
Everyone calls your twenties your "selfish years". Your twenties are a time for you to explore, travel, put yourself out there, fall in love, create endless memories, and have stories that will last you a lifetime. It's your time to go chase your dreams, be selfish with what you want, and grow into the person you are supposed to become. One night, about two months after my 20th birthday, I was looking through old pictures from family vacations, trips, and different adventures I had taken before the pandemic hit. My craving for an adventure was at an all-time high, and I was slightly losing my mind about how I hadn't left New England in over a year. I broke down completely and started frantically googling places to travel to.
Now, I have a friend named Sydney, she is just like I am, craves adventure, loves spontaneity, and is down for any crazy idea that life throws at her. So it's no surprise that when I randomly called her that night blabbing on about the fact that I want to just pack up my car and drive it all the way to Los Angeles that she immediately was all in. And that's how it all started, one mental breakdown about how badly I wanted to travel again, and a quick phone call later with my crazy adventure buddy, and it was settled, in a month and a half we were going to hop in my car and drive across the country.
The next month and a half were pretty uneventful. Our days consisted of working to save up as much money as we could to make it across the country, and our nights consisted of hours of planning and mapping out our route. Somewhere in that month and a half before we left we added a third member to join our journey, my friend Michael. Michael is the outdoorsy, athletic, hiker-type that was the perfect addition to our road trip dream team. And it also didn't hurt to have a guy joining us on the trip as well. Not to say that Syd and I wouldn't have been fine by ourselves, but we were going into unknown territory and had no idea what obstacles this journey would bring us. Also, not trying to be stereotypical, but I have zero knowledge of cars and how they work/ how to fix them if something happens. So it was safe to say adding Michael was a smart decision in case of an emergency or any technical difficulties. But that's it! After hours of planning how to road trip on a budget, where to camp, what route to take, etc, the dream team was assembled and ready to pack ourselves into my Subaru Crostrek and drive our asses to California. :)
The Dream Team
Planning and Our Itinerary:
Now for the fun stuff... NOT... planning!!!
While this was actually a lot easier than I was originally anticipating, it still took a lot of work and time to get it right, so I'm going to show you guys how we went about planning this trip on a budget and were still able to fit everything in.
All three of us are college students, who all work part-time jobs, and that is about it. Most of us were funding this trip all on our own so it was ideal to keep it as cheap as we possibly could. Needless to say, we were very successful in keeping the expenses down. There were three main factors that we needed to consider for the price, and it was gas, housing, and food. We knew these would end up costing us the most money so I'll break it down on how we saved money in these categories:
The biggest factor on the road trip was gas, especially once we got out west and gas prices were much higher than we were used to. We estimated that it would cost roughly $450-500 to get to California from NH. Now $500 divided by the three of us still isn't horrible, but we were determined to get that number even lower. So, we bought window markers from Walmart to write on the back window of my car. We wrote: "21st Bday Roadtrip! Buy us a Drink!" and then we wrote our Venmo on the back of the car along with it. I wasn't quite sure how this would work out, I guessed that maybe at MOST we would make around $100 over the 2 weeks we were on the road. Man, was I wrong. By the time we had gotten to California, we ended up with just over $400 in Venmo from random strangers telling us "happy birthday" and "drinks on us!". Now unfortunately that money did not go towards any drinks, but it did cover almost all of our gas expenses, so thank you very much to all you random generous strangers.
How We Got All Our Gas Paid For By Strangers
The next factor we needed to consider was where we would be staying along the road trip. Lucky for us, we have a lot of family and friends that are scattered across the US, so we tried to stay with as many family and friends as possible because that was easily the cheapest option. 4 out of the 11 nights we were able to crash at people's houses. Our next option for housing on the nights we weren't near anyone we knew was camping.
All of us had some camping gear and a tent that we were able to bring with us because we could not afford hotels every single night. We mainly stayed at KOA campsites. They are usually about $30 a night for a tent spot, which was all we needed, and they all have bathrooms, showers, and laundry rooms for you to use. Which when you are on the road, it's nice to have access to those amenities. KOA campsites are also very family-friendly, and overall very safe places to stay no matter what state you are in.
Lastly, how we ate during our trip. We stocked up at the grocery store right before we left with all the essentials. Lots of chips, cereal, peanut butter, bread, and Nutella for sandwiches, etc. Not many perishable foods or foods that needed to be refrigerated. While we did end up bringing a small cooler, we honestly always forgot to get ice and didn't really end up using it. There were a few nights near the end of our trip where we ate out a restaurant because we were sick of having sandwiches every day, but for the most part, we lived off of the food in our car and whatever snacks we would find at the gas stations we stopped at.
The overall planning of our route wasn't so bad either. We highlighted the main places we wanted to stop at and then planned the trip accordingly. I believe when we started our main stops were Badlands National Park, Glacier National Park, The National Parks in Utah, Denver Colorado, and Sand Dunes National Park. Now unfortunately we did not make it to Glacier National park because it was just very much out of the way of all the other National Parks we wanted to stop at, but we did successfully make it to the rest of the National Parks on our list! We mapped out the easiest route to stop at all these national parks and then were able to fill in additional stops and things to do along the way once we had our main points of interest figured out! To keep everything organized I wrote everything down in a google doc and mapped out our route on Roadtrippers (I will attach a link to the PDF of our Interary at the end of the blog for whoever wants to see it). And that was it! After we mapped out the route and our stops we were ready to hit the road and take off to LA.
The next blog posts will be broken up into a few blogs to show everything that we did during our road trip instead of making it into one long post. There will be many parts highlighting each part of the trip and I am very excited to share it with you all!
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