16 Day, 2629 Mile, Road Trip Through California, Las Vegas and The Grand Canyon

A few general tips about our costs:

Flights: These were booked with Norwegian Air who in our view are the best budget long haul flight provider at the moment. We paid £488 Gatwick to Los Angeles and £490 Los Angeles to Gatwick. Latest price for return flights Gatwick/Los Angeles (with 20kg hold luggage) in February as low as £770 return total cost for 2 people. Bargain!   *** UPDATED 2022 – Unfortunately Norwegian Air are no longer flying long haul routes since the pandemic. Hopefully another company will take on a budget long haul option for us travellers!

Car Hire: We booked this really early when Car Rentals were offering up to 50% discounts. Great thing we found is that insurance is fully comprehensive and extra driver is free. Worry free car hire as they call it. Keep your eye out for the bargains!

Accommodation: Book as early as possible and always on free cancellation. We couldn’t find better prices than Booking.com and nearly all rooms can be booked and cancelled for free, giving us the opportunity to swap accommodation if a better deal comes up nearer the time, which quite often did. Sign up with them and after booking with them for a while you will gain genius status with regular offers of up to 15% discounts, free breakfast, room upgrades and cool stuff like that!  We researched our motel rooms well,  wanting the best prices but with good reviews on cleanliness, comfort and good bath/shower room, and decided against shared hostels, although we have nothing against them!  All having a fridge, microwave and coffee maker, all had super huge comfy beds/pillows.

Petrol: We estimated we would spend £220 on fuel but ended up spending £310. We under estimated both the amount of miles we would do but more the cost per gallon in different locations (we assumed we would do 2500 miles but we in fact covered 2629) and the price of fuel ranged from $3.40 to $4.65 right up to $7.95 – which we had to pay in the Mojave Dessert when we nearly ran out – we won’t make that mistake again!

Sightseeing Tickets: One of the best purchases we made was the America The Beautiful Annual Pass. Costing us $80 for the year it gives you access to all the National Parks in America including Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Entry for many of the parks can be as much as $35 per car. We visited National Parks on 5 occasions each costing $35 dollars to enter (works out we would have spent $175 on entry fees – we saved $85 and have the pass for the rest of the year if we return). Obviously you’ll have to work out how many parks you are going to visit to see if its better value (Visit more than two and its a saving!).
Tip: Ask for the pass at the first National Park you visit (its not always visible on the charge board when you arrive at the park, so make sure you ask for it).
Our other sightseeing cost was a whale watching trip in Monterey. We paid full price as it was spur of the moment (as blue whales had been spotted earlier in the day) and we weren’t disappointed,we saw 4!  You can often find Whale Watching Tickets cheaper bookable in advance on Groupon which we often use for deals.

Food: This deserves a mention as everyone will have different ideas about a food budget. We can only tell you about our needs. Our total food budget for the trip was £1050 and you will see that we only spent £520. Here’s how and why we only spent this much.

How we spent this amount: We purchased a fold up cool bag, bought most of our food from Walmart or other Delis and supermarkets on route and kept food cold with ice readily available from the motels.  We also made sure we only booked a motel room that had a fridge and microwave. We only ate in restaurants 3 times, the rest of the time we made use of motel microwaves or made up our own picnic meals and ate overlooking beaches or canyons. This certainly isn’t for everyone, but we have travelled like this before, through Thailand, making our limited funds go further while always eating healthy (Julie saw to that). We can honestly say that we never felt hungry during the 16 days and we even managed to have at least 10 Starbucks coffees within our budget!  We did have quite a few rotisserie chickens, quite a few microwaved potatoes,  and along with tinned tuna and fish, bread, fruit, salad and yoghurt, we did ok.

Why we spent this amount: Simple really, to save money – which you get to spend on other things.   As a result of the saving, we were able to pay for a further 7 nights accommodation in San Diego! From where I am presently writing this blog.  It’s the only part of our budget where we could actually save money and our view is that if we have to go without a few treats of big meals in restaurants and breakfasts in Diners to allow us to see another city or location then its well worth it!
It won’t be everyone’s view and some people couldn’t manage it, but we are more than happy to give you advice or share our tips on this in greater detail. Just get in touch.