Six tips for a money-smart road trip
Being rigid in planning a route but flexible in schedule and housing are ways to ensure you get the most bang for your buck on the open road.
Hamm argues that a set route with a flexible timetable is the best way to enjoy your road trip.
Business Wire/File
A few days ago, I mentioned that my family and I are going on a summer vacation to South Dakota and eastern Wyoming, where we intend to see Badlands National Park, Black Hills National Forest, Devil鈥檚 Tower, Mount Rushmore, and several other things in the area.
Several people wrote to me after that post asking for details on our trip planning. Most of them were from people who were also planning trips to the South Dakota area in the next year or two, but at least a few were looking for some strong general tactics for frugal family vacation planning.
We鈥檝e become fairly adept at planning out affordable and memorable family vacations over the years, even with young children. Just in our oldest son鈥檚 lifetime, we鈥檝e taken long trips to the Chicagoland area, Lake Superior, Texas, western Washington state (this was the only non-road trip), and now to South Dakota and Wyoming. Each of these trips has been affordable and enjoyable for everyone involved.
I鈥檓 usually the one in charge of planning our family vacations. Here鈥檚 the process I use for planning them.
Pick a location, not a destination
聽If you center your vacation around a specific destination (say, Disneyworld), that becomes the focus of the trip. Other opportunities in and around that area become secondary to the destination, and the destination is often an expensive one.
Whenever we plan a trip, we try to make the location of the trip as general as possible. For example, we could easily say that this trip was to the Black Hills National Forest, but instead we鈥檙e thinking of it as a trip to South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. That way, the trip鈥檚 focus isn鈥檛 just on the Black Hills.
Look for everything of interest within that location
聽One great way to do this is to order a state or regional visitor鈥檚 guide (or look one up online). Almost every state has a department of tourism that produces a wonderful traveler鈥檚 guide for their state.
For example, South Dakota has a great listing things worth seeing and doing within the state.
Over a period of a few weeks, we looked through these guides and marked everything of interest to us, which was quite a lot. I made special note of things that seemed interesting that were also free (or very low cost), as these activities would provide the backbone of our trip.
Use Google Maps to plan the route
聽After a while, I started marking locations of interest within Google Maps. This helped me to eliminate locations that were outliers. For example, there was some interest in visiting Wounded Knee, but there was nothing else marked within two or three hours of driving of that location, so we eliminated it from consideration.
Eventually, we recognized that most of the things we wanted to see (at least, ones that weren鈥檛 outliers) were fairly close to a single driving path, so we set that as our driving path.
Be loose with the trip planning
聽For each of the 鈥減ins鈥� marked on Google Maps, I will be printing off an address and a page of information describing what it is and why it鈥檚 interesting. We鈥檒l assemble these (along with the maps) in a 鈥渢rip binder,鈥� which we鈥檒l take along on the trip.
To this point, we haven鈥檛 scheduled anything with a specific time or date. There may be things that require a specific time or date when you travel, but you鈥檙e better off minimizing those and allow your schedule to be flexible, because there will always be interesting impromptu things to see on an open-ended trip.
Look at a wide variety of housing
聽Housing on vacation doesn鈥檛 have to simply mean booking a hotel room. If you鈥檙e driving in the area, camping is a possibility, too. If you have a large group, a cabin in the area might be less expensive, considering you can make some of your meals there.
Rather than just hitting something like hotels.com when looking for housing, we use things like TripAdvisor and look at options like camping, cabins, rental homes, and other options.
Which one is the right choice? It depends on your group composition, really. For some groups, camping would be the best option (this is certainly true if it鈥檚 just my wife, my children, and myself). For larger groups, a cabin might be the best option as it might reduce the cost per person to a level lower than a hotel. There may also be people with special needs in the group that lean you toward one option or another.
The key is to not limit yourself to just hotels. There are many less expensive housing options if you expand your horizons, particularly when you consider places that enable you to make most of your own food instead of constantly eating at restaurants, which can really add up.
Use the 鈥減eak-end鈥� rule
聽On our trips, we usually let everyone select one thing that they really want to do out of the options and we make sure that we do that thing, no matter what it is.
For example, I really want to see the Crazy Horse Monument, while my wife is very excited about going to Devil鈥檚 Tower. Our oldest son wants to hike in the Black Hills, and our daughter wants to see Mount Rushmore. All of these are things we will definitely see on the trip.
Simply put, we make sure everyone has a great 鈥減eak鈥� experience for the trip.
Similarly, we try to figure out one thing that we all have a strong interest in doing. For the parents and the two older children, the one thing we all really want to see is a gold mine. (Yes, seriously. We鈥檙e kind of quirky.) We plan on doing this on the last day of the trip, providing our 鈥渆nd鈥� experience.
Everything else we do is really secondary to these things, because most of our memories from the trip will come from our 鈥減eak鈥� experience and our 鈥渆nd鈥� experience, and as long as we鈥檙e all happy with those, the rest of the trip can be filled with whatever may come. That鈥檚 why we have a trip binder with many free options to fill our days.
The result of this planning is a family vacation we鈥檒l all enjoy that鈥檚 not loaded down with expensive destinations. It鈥檚 worked wonderfully for our last several family vacations, and we don鈥檛 see it changing for this one.