My husband and I have talked FOR YEARS about taking our children on a cross-country driving trip to let them see the size and diversity of America. We agreed that we wanted to wait 'til they were old enough to appreciate what they were seeing, and 2009's the year!
When we started talking about this years ago we both assumed that we'd rent an RV, and we were excited about that new adventure; however, when we picked out the "best year" for us and started crunching numbers, we quickly abandoned the RV idea. Why? First, the cost of renting was vastly higher than we'd expected. And don't forget that the rental cost isn't going to be the whole thing; once you find a campsite or park, there's another $25-50 site fee per night. Then there's the gas mileage -- and who knows how much gas'll cost next summer? Then there's the over-your-daily-allotment-of-miles fee, and the difficulty of driving the large vehicle through some of the large cities we plan to visit. Finally, we didn't really want to tow our own car, but we also didn't want to be without easy transportation around town. In a nutshell, when we started looking at the reality of an RV, it wasn't what we'd imagined.
Instead, we're using hotel rooms. For our circumstances, it's going to be considerably less expensive.
There are good and bad points: Hotels can be found closer to the things we want to see, so that means less driving around town once we stop somewhere. Hotels do mean carting our luggage in and out every day, but they also mean swimming pools, laundry rooms, free ice, and complementary breakfast. We'll have more space in a hotel. We're losing the kitchen that the RV would have, but our number-crunching shows that we're coming out ahead even if we eat out twice a day (and have a cooler with sandwiches and snacks on hand). The final deciding factor for us was that we're getting many of our hotels for FREE; we're even getting two rooms or a two-room suite in many places, and we're STILL coming out CHEAPER than the RV. My husband's saved up his reward "points" from many business travel trips over the last couple years, and they're equaling about 50% of our hotel stays for free. In the past I've used his "points" for long weekends here and there when the kids were out of school, but we've been hoarding them for about two years now, and it's really helping on this trip.
Some people love the RV lifestyle, and they're willing to pay a premium for quiet evenings in the campsite where they can sit by the fire and watch the kids ride bikes. That's great, but it's not our goal for this trip: our goal is to cover lots of ground and see as much as possible.
I'd suggest that you look into just what's available to you before you make the decision. If you have a neighbor who'll rent you an RV for super-cheap, your numbers might look very different from mine. Or if you plan to drive a ways, then stay put for 4-5 days before moving on, you might not care so much about the gas mileage as I do. Doing your own math is the only way to know for sure.
