joansantacroce

The Beginning

How to plan a cross country trip : Travel

The best place to start is usually at the beginning…

I have never traveled cross country and I had no experience planning an extensive trip. I recalled that as a young single parent, I had gone to “Triple A” and had “Trip Tix” made up for trips with my children. I headed to the nearest “Triple A” and I was told that they no longer make “Trip Tix”, I went to a second “Triple A” and I was told the same thing. Next I searched for books on trip planning… again I found nothing. I began searching blogs. I found lots of blogs on traveling the National Parks, and I read them. They provided lots of tips on things to bring, and places to visit, even routes to take. I took lots of notes, however no one discussed how they planned their trip or how they budgeted for the trip. I envisioned a spread sheet in Excel that would calculate costs. I did not know how to lay the sheet out. I decided to search my computer Excel program, and there it was!! I did not have to create the sheet- it was there – My Trip Planner. I was thrilled and began laying it out for our trip. I created a travel page, a lodging page, an activities page and a budget page.

My best friend and I are planning a cross country trip to visit many of the National Parks. We also plan to visit Ellen’s sister and my daughter, both of whom live in the West. We began with our budget and decided on $10,000.00 for hotels, fuel, and activities at the parks. Our budget does not include food. We plan to bring much of our food, and eat out on special occasions. Neither of us consider ourselves “foodies”, it is not a priority for us. We eat to live, not the reverse. If you are a foodie, be sure to add it to your budget.

Now that I had a budget I wanted to determine the cost of traveling across the country. I researched the expected miles per gallon for my car, and used a higher price per gallon for gasoline, expecting the usual Summer surge in gas prices. I used my spread sheet and entered a column for each of these items in my Travel page. See Example Below…

Trip#	Date	Time	From	To	Est. miles	Fuel cost	#Nights Spent	Actual miles driven	Actual fuel cost	Tolls
12 Purple Pg 229 Wyoming	XXX	1 hour	Grand Teton NP	Yellowstone NP	57	$12.87	3

I numbered each trip for mapping purposes. I used google maps to estimate mileage and I used an atlas to have a hard copy of each trip. Numerous blogs and websites warned against being totally dependent on navigation systems, and urged the traveler to have a hard copy back up. My hard copy maps are color coded and numbered. On column 1-Trip# – it reads this is trip 12, the map is coded purple and it begins on page 229 in Wyoming. There is a column for the departure date, how long we anticipate this trip to take, where we are leaving and our destination, the estimated miles and estimated fuel cost, and how long we plan to stay at this destination. The next columns will record the actual miles, the actual fuel cost, and any tolls. I also have included on my spread sheet, the park entrance we plan to use, the closest visitor center to that entrance and special notes related to that trip – for example, on trip 12 we are entering Yellowstone via the South entrance – I added in special notes general directions – take 191 North to 20 East into Yellowstone South entrance. Using the Excel spread sheet, I was able to estimate the cost of each trip, total it and add it into our budget. See Next Step ;Setting up Lodging.