Bring an extra gallon of water – Road trip tip

by Gadling Staff on

Travelers generally think to bring bottled drinking water, but few realize how frustrating it is to need a larger quantity of water with no way to get it.

Some rest areas have poorly designed sinks that automatically squirt liquid soap, run water for a few seconds, and then immediately turn on a hand dryer. Brushing your teeth in these contraptions is nearly impossible.

Keep a gallon of extra water tucked away in the trunk for rinsing sticky stuff off your hands, splashing on your face, using to brush your teeth, or even filling an overheated radiator.

How to Stay Healthy on a Road Trip

by Katie Hammel on

Finding the willpower to eat healthy while traveling is hard enough when you have access to fresh markets and cooking utensils. It becomes even more of a challenge when you’re on a road trip, trapped in a car for hours on end, with nothing but fast food restaurants and greasy spoon diners for roadside dining options. But with a little planning, a little extra time, and a lot of self-control, you can eat healthy while on a road trip. Here are few tips.

Start your day off right.
Begin your day with a carbohydrate feast and you’ll be craving carbs again in a few hours. Put down the donut and instead, take the time to have a healthy breakfast at your hotel. Eat a good mix of whole grains and protein and you’ll ingest fewer calories while staying full later into the afternoon.

Get some exercise.
Spending eight hours or more being sedentary in the car means that your body may be burning a lot fewer calories than normal. Reduce your intake accordingly and try to get a nominal amount of exercise. Even if all you do is take a 15-minute walk in the morning and then do a few bonus laps every time you stop along your route, you’ll feel good having stretched your legs. Even better: plan your stops around scenic walks or hikes so you can do a little sightseeing while you get moving.Pack healthy snacks.
It’s easy and tempting to swing through the drive-thru or grab some chips from the gas station, but that won’t do your waistline any favors. Pack healthy snacks like almonds, granola or trail mix (choose low fat, low sodium, high fiber varieties), fruit and peanut butter, or power bars. Depending on the length of your drive, you can pack a cooler with items like string cheese sticks or hummus and pita. Just refill the ice each day at your hotel. And don’t forget to drink lots of water throughout the day and avoid coffee and soda.

Choose your meal stops wisely.
It’s harder to make healthy choices at a place where the daily special is a triple cheeseburger or a chicken-fried steak. If you can, take an hour to stop and have a proper meal once a day. Sit down, eat slowly, and follow the same healthy rules you normal use for eating out – choose grilled or broiled over fried, get dressings on the side, opt for tomato-based instead of creamy sauce. If you don’t feel like dining out, try to seek out a grocery store where you can pick up healthy prepared foods to go. Most Whole Foods locations have extensive salad bars and cut fruit available to go.

Road Trip Tips: researching and planning to pinch pennies

by Darren Murph on

Let’s face it: road trips are becoming less and less common in America. We’ve got (near) record-high fuel prices, a pressure on us to work more and take less time off (thanks, recession) and more entertainment options than ever before close to our homes. Put simply, road trips aren’t nearly as easy to take as they’ve been in the past, but they’re just as awe-inspiring today as they’ve always been.

If you’ve been looking to burn a few weeks of banked vacation, spend a bit of quality time with your family, see a few long-lost relatives elsewhere in the country and mark one or two more of your Bucket List items off, there’s no better way to accomplish all of that than by packing your Winnebago (or whatever vehicle resides in your garage) and hitting the highways. Despite what you may believe, you just might have enough in savings to pull off your dream road trip, and we’ve got a few tips beyond the break that’ll save you bundles along the way. Just be prepared to put in the legwork during the “planning” phase.Plan your routes around family and friends

Lodging is undoubtedly one of the biggest expenses when it comes to making a road trip happen. Sure, some of you may be able to rough it in tents along the way, but for families who need amenities like hot breakfasts, showers and actual bedding, there’s no quicker way to drain your road trip account than by shacking up in the Embassy Suites each night. Our suggestion? Plan your stops around friends and family who won’t mind you staying a night or two. Asking distant relatives to use their home for over three days can come across as demanding and imposing, but most anyone with a soul will let you crash for one or two days. If planned right, you can stay a day with a friend for free (or a small — and recommended — donation) and then the next night in a hotel. If you repeat this one-and-one strategy, you’ve just cut your hotel costs in half, all while getting the opportunity to catch up with folks that probably mean a lot to you.

Stop eating out so much

It’s a fact of life that we all must eat. But choosing to eat at a restaurant three times per day is murder on the bank account. We recommend stocking up on groceries from the outset, using healthy snacks and fruits to fill your belly during the day in order to bridge the gap between breakfast and supper. If you keep yourself occupied during the daylight hours, it’s even easier to get by on a granola bar and banana while waiting for a serious meal at night. Even cutting out one full meal per day can save you a significant amount over the course of your trip.

Drive something with great fuel economy

Unless you’re planning a trip through blizzard-like conditions, you should really choose your Corolla over the Commander when embarking on a multi-thousand mile trip. Over the course of the journey, using a car that gets 35MPH on the highway instead of one that’s lucky to get 20MPG can save you hundreds of dollars in fuel costs. You’re probably saying that you just can’t fit everything into your “small car.” We’d suggest packing lighter, and using those aforementioned stops at houses to wash your clothes.

Flying to your start point? Search for nearby airports

Planning to start your trip in Minneapolis and eventually make your way down to the Dakotas? Don’t just blindly book airline tickets to MSP. Kayak.com allows your to search nearby airports, and better still, you can do your own research to scout out lesser-known airstrips within driving range of your intended origination point. We were planning such a trip recently, and we found that we could save over $100 per ticket by flying into Madison, Wisconsin. That’s just 4.5 hours away by car, and it gives us an even greater excuse to explore the Badger State.

Renting a car? Do your research

We recently embarked on a Southwest road trip which started in Las Vegas, Nevada. Believe it or not, there are literally scores of car rental outlets in Sin City, and the vast majority of them aren’t connected to McCarran International Airport. Car rentals get really, really interesting (and expensive, too) when you have a drop-off location that’s different than your pick-up location, and prices vary wildly from carrier to carrier and location to location. For this example, we wanted to leave from Vegas and drop the vehicle off in San Antonio eight days later.

We spent hours scouring the web’s best price searching engines (Kayak.com gets our recommendations), and what we found was downright astounding. This same itinerary could cost us upwards of $1,500 or as little as $598 depending on the company and the pick-up location, and that was searching for the cheapest car class across the board. There’s simply no avoiding the “one-way drop fee” that skyrockets the cost of a rental car if you don’t drop it off at the same location that you picked it up at. It’s a sad fact of life, but if you use these other tips to save in other areas, this fee becomes a wee bit easier to absorb.

We eventually found that Hertz, in this particular situation, was the cheapest option. But when picking up at McCarran International Airport (which is actually a shuttle bus ride away from the airpot — not exactly the epitome of convenience), the cheapest we could rent a Toyota Corolla for the eight days was around $800. Hertz has around a dozen other rental outlets scattered about the City of Lights, most of which are within hotels and casinos. We put our request into each and every Hertz hotel / casino location in Las Vegas until we found the cheapest one: The Riveria. For reasons unknown, this pickup location — just minutes away from the $800 LAS lot — was over $200 cheaper for the trip.

We should also mention that essentially every car rental company adds a fee (usually around 10 percent, sometimes higher) to your rental when picking up at an airport facility. If you can somehow get away from the airport and pick your ride up at a satellite facility, the cost savings can be tremendous. Obviously, each and every scenario is different (another search of ours found Hertz to be the most expensive option, as an example), so it’s on you to research the options intently. We’d also recommend renting the smallest car that’ll fit your needs in order to get the best gas mileage — you’re about to roll some for hours on end each day, and you could use the MPG improvement.

Take a GPS system

This day and age, you’d be crazy to take off without a GPS. TomTom even has a feature on its newest units (IQ Routes) that intelligently finds the most fuel efficient route when you plug in your destination, and beyond that, not getting lost saves you both time and money. And it keeps you sane, which is always a good thing on a vacation. These are also fantastic for plotting spontaneous trips during the day; on our recent journey across the Southwest, we found ourselves with more time than expected on one given day. We knew that US 163 was a must-see, so we simply plugged in “Bluff, UT” from our current location at the Four Corners. The GPS routed us back into Utah where we could easily pick up our desired highway and head down to Monument Valley State Park.

A secondary option here would be a smartphone with a great mapping system (any Android-based phone or an iPhone comes to mind), as these provide great visuals and can jar your memory of off-the-wall places that you’d like to visit. And besides — visiting beautiful sections of America just to gaze costs little or no money.

Take advantage of the National Parks

We can’t shout this loudly enough: whatever country you’re in, the National Parks are there for your enjoyment. They’re your parks, and your tax dollars are paying for their preservation. The least you could do would be to stop by and see how your monies are being spent. On a more serious note, National Parks currently stand as some of the cheapest entertainment options on the road today. Many parks are free to enjoy, while most are under $15 for a five to seven day pass. Even the few that are over $20 (Joshua Tree National Park comes to mind) are easily worth it, and considering that two theater tickets in any mid-sized city will run you more than that for two hours of enjoyment, you can see that there’s still a great deal of value in the National Park system.

Our personal experience is this: I don’t really remember exactly how much fun I had at Busch Gardens two years ago, but I can tell you for sure that I spent over $130 on two people just to get in and not starve while I was there. I spent under $40 on a trip to Grand Canyon National Park (including gas from a family’s home that was two hours away), and I’ll remember those images for the rest of my adult life. It’s incredibly simple to burn a whole day inside one National Park, and chances are you’ll wish you had even more time once you’re there.

[Images provided by Dana Jo Photography]

5 little-known, must-see sites on a Southwest road trip

by Darren Murph on

So, you’ve settled on the American Southwest as your next road trip destination. Congratulations — you’ve made a sound choice indeed. Picking one of America’s most storied regions to ramble around in is the easy part, but selecting the routes and spots to see is a bit more difficult. You’ve always got the obvious choices – Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, for instance — but it’s the offbeat gems that really stick with you long after you dust off your boots, hang the cowboy hat and return the rental car.

We recently embarked on a 3,600 mile journey that crisscrossed the Southwest, touching parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. The cliché stops were nothing short of awe-inspiring, but we found five must-see areas along the way that showcased exactly what this region of the country is all about. Read on if you’re eager to get your wheels turning.

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Lake Mead National Recreation Area

When you think of beautiful sights in the south of the Silver State, you probably think of neon skyscrapers, or if we’re talking really south, the Hoover Dam. Frankly, there’s no need to fight the crowds at either. For just $5 per vehicle, the 40 or so mile drive from south to north of the park is a wild ride full of expansive views, a plethora of short (albeit rewarding) hikes and a relative lack of human life. Don’t be shocked if you find yourself atop a peak, overlooking miles of pristine desert mountains, with nary a soul in sight. If you’re looking to connect with nature (or just disconnect from the hustle and bustle of the real world), you won’t find a more stunning hour-long drive in Nevada.

Bryce Canyon City, Utah

Just a few short hours outside of desert lies a brisk, highly elevated region of Utah that few outsiders bother to explore. The minuscule town (or should we say village?) of Bryce Canyon City has but two real hotels, and one of those were constructed last May. This place truly shines in the winter; we checked in to the Bryce Canyon Grand Hotel to find an exceptionally friendly staff, a well appointed room, a steaming outdoor hot tub circled by snow and a hot breakfast that would make your local Shoney’s envious. Horseback rides overlooking Utah’s gorgeous orange rocks are but miles away, and the exceedingly underrated Bryce Canyon National Park is right next door. You’re also under two hours away from skiing at Brian Head, and better still, Scenic Byway 12 is just up the road. Speaking of…

Scenic Byway US 12

You’d be doing yourself a huge disservice by not traversing the entire 120 mile stretch of asphalt, which is known as Utah’s first all-American highway. Starting at Bryce Canyon City and terminating at Torrey, this sparsely driven gem carves through towering mountains, stunning monuments and a few towns in particular that are just oozing with character (Tropic and Escalante, if you’re wondering). We found dozens of scenic pulloffs that were impossible to pass by, and the dearth of other vehicles allowed for countless in-road snaps that truly demonstrate the magic of a road trip. For those with ample time, an off-road tested vehicle and plenty of spare gas cans, the 55.5 mile Hole-in-the-Rock Road at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is the preeminent “road less traveled.”

Four Corners / Scenic Byway US 163

There’s really only one way to start the southbound journey down US 163, and that’s from the east after a jaunt down to the Four Corners of America. Sure, you could cut through Utah from the north, but where’s the fun in that? Stepping foot in four states simultaneously generates a feeling of pride and joviality that we have personally never felt in any other scenario — in a sense, it’s the ultimate travel accomplishment, or at least the one that you’ll never forget to tell your grand-kids about. Shortly after you pass Bluff, UT, US 163 begins; it takes but a mile to captivate. Sandwiched on both sides by towering rocks and colossal peaks, the town of Mexican Hat (and the aptly named rock to which the place owes its moniker) is a comedic break in the otherwise solemn excursion. Monument Valley State Park, just north of the Arizona border, is a satisfying conclusion to the buildup that precedes it. A seemingly never-ending expanse of otherworldly statues dot the roadside, inviting you to rest your laurels while soaking in the untamed southwest sun.

Pecos, Texas

If you notice yourself on I-10 heading east (which you won’t, given that Interstates are strictly forbidden ’round these parts), you’ll see a billboard or two beckoning you to visit Pecos. Unlike those signs coaxing you to break for “The Thing?,” this sleepy town of under 10,000 is certainly worth a look. As the story goes, the world’s first rodeo was held here in 1883, and by the looks of it, the weekend wranglin’ is still at the height of popularity over a century later. You’ll find wildly colorful buildings lining the generally wide-open downtown, more pick-up trucks and spurs than you could ever imagine, and beyond all of that, a real, bona fide taste of Texas. Without question, the essence of Texas is still alive and well in the far west of the state. If you dreamed of tumbleweeds and dusty streets but stumbled upon meadows and metropolises when you landed in central Texas, you’ll find the authentic Lone Star vibe you’re searching for just a few hundred (lonely) miles to the west.

[Images provided by Dana Jo Photography]

Visit a ghost town – Road trip tip

by Gadling Staff on

If you’re looking for an interesting side-trip, or you just want to get out of town for a quick day trip, visit a ghost town.

To find a ghost town, log on to ghosttowns.com, which lists hundreds of ghost towns by state and county and describes what makes each spot unique and “ghostly.”

You may be surprised at how many ghost towns are in your area. Just don’t get scared.