California: an overview

Hello!

Welcome to my first blog post. I promise to actually try and be good at this. I've had a few failed blog attempts in the past, but let's not focus on that. Let's focus on CALIFORNIA.

This was the sunset on our first day of the trip.

I hate road trips. I loathe them. But the way we planned our trip made it totally bearable and incredibly enjoyable. You need to do it, and you need to do it now.

The Basics:

We (Naomi and I) planned this trip a few months in advance. It started out as a joke like, "lol, wouldn't it be fun to do a road trip in California?" and we made it a reality. Neither of us have substantial amounts of disposable income; we planned this as economically as possible. So there should be nothing stopping you.

We started our trip in San Francisco and ended in San Diego (technically Los Angeles, but I'll get to that) traveling mainly on the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and seeing everything in between. We were there almost two weeks and made changes to our itinerary along the way. The more time you give yourself, the better. Allow for unexpected problems, traffic, wanting to skip certain places or stay longer in others, that way you're not stressed about making it to the next city in time. Don't think of your itinerary as a bunch of deadlines, you will only stress yourself out. Take your time and enjoy the trip because it always ends way too quickly.

Planning; Hotels:

Have everything organized ahead of time, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you know you definitely have a place to sleep each night. Naomi booked most of the hotels a few weeks in advance using booking.com since they usually advertise specials and almost always have free cancellation. We chose places that were usually in the $30-$40/night range (each) and included a free breakfast. It definitely saved us a lot of money as we only had to buy breakfast a handful of times. We also used AirBNB and found a great place in LA that was both affordable AND had free parking (which is super hard to come by in LA!). Always do your research, and check reviews on multiple travel sites before booking. But of course, take everything with a grain of salt. While we chose to stay in hotels&hostels most nights, you could always couchsurf for free and really make your trip extra affordable. The most important thing is to always be safe.

Planning; Flights:

I'm a flight fanatic. I'd fly anywhere if I could. Even to Baltimore, which is only a 45 minute drive from my house. And since I love flying so much, I am constantly monitoring flights to different cities. I even check flights for my coworkers and have developed a real talent for finding affordable trips. It's best to use multiple search engines to find the best deal; I use Trip Advisor, Kayak and Cheap Tickets most frequently. Trip Advisor tends to find cheaper flights internationally, but Cheap Tickets allows you to check 3 days before and after to really compare prices. Kayak also has a forecasting tool that tells you whether or not they predict prices to go up or down. Southwest doesn't generally show up on any of these search engines, so always check their website directly for inexpensive flights. And don't be afraid to fly into a different airport! Each search engine listed above allows you to check nearby airports, for example: Instead of flying into LAX, check Long Beach. If you can't get a flight into JFK or LaGuardia, check Newark. If flying directly into DC isn't an option, check Baltimore and take the train directly into downtown DC. Checking nearby airports can yield cheaper flights and most airports have some form of transportation you can take into your final destination. I ended up booking two non-stop flights on Virgin for $370 total which is an AMAZING deal for two direct flights literally across the country. I'll do a post specifically on Virgin later.

Planning; Car Rental

Naomi booked the rental car using Sunny Cars, which is a third party car rental company located in The Netherlands (Naomi is from Belgium). Her friend had used it before with no problems and luckily we had no issues either! They have a 24/7 helpline (which we never needed to use, thankfully) but we did have to prepay in full for the car. We chose this site because every other company had horrendously high prices since they include an insurance fee for drivers under the age of 25. Sunny Cars did not include this fee, and we ended up paying around $400 each for 11 days (we didn't need the car till the end of the first day or the last two days). It was definitely the most expensive part of the trip but you can't do a road trip without a car so it was a necessity. If you are over 25 you can definitely expect to pay a lot less than we did. Picking up the car was super easy (it was at an Alamo in downtown SF) and dropping it off was even easier. We were able to request a full tank of gas starting out, and didn't have to return it with a full tank either which probably saved us a good amount of money considering how expensive gas is in California. We also got a free upgrade to a much nicer and newer car than we were expecting since none of the cars in the size we requested (the smallest) were clean. We ended up with a brand new, eco friendly Dodge Charger. It was amazing. I'll leave you with a photo of us in our car being super excited. 

Apparently I couldn't look into the lens. Oh well.

I'll be focusing on San Francisco for my next post, which I will probably write in a few days. 

XO,

Casey