A Free Guide to the Open Road!

For those of you who don't know, AAA has a service for their members in which they map out any kind of road trip you may be interested in, provide information on gas, food, and lodging along the way, give suggestions for where to stop depending on your interests, and provide you with free travel books, maps, etc. Luckily for us Devin is covered under her mother's membership so naturally we went to the company today to take advantage of all they have to offer. We left with a plethera of free stuff including maps of every state and region we plan to visit, travel books for every state, and camping books for each state as well.  They even printed out a "TripTik" for us where every stop along the way is mapped out for us and we flip through it page by page as we continue throughout our journey. 

 

Needless to say we owe a special thanks to Devin's mother, Wendy, for the AAA membership that fostered our first big leap into the world of travel. Can't wait to start reading up on all the possibilities! 



First Deposit

We are proud to say that we have both put in our first deposits in our sweet Savings Jar! :) (Since our initial $100 deposits.) Tonight is the infamous Taco Tuesday in wonderful San Diego but we have forgone the drunken festivities to save some dollars for our road trip. We have been trying to save money on food by not eating out, however our busy schedules have prevented us from our usual weekly grocery shopping trip. So we have been scrounging the cupboards and the fridge and although we have not gone hungry we have not been eating our usual healthy diet. A stable diet of rice and beans has kept us going.

Savings Jar

Today we began the planning and budgeting aspects of our road trip. First we looked at the dates we will be leaving and decided we will have 3 weeks exactly to complete the trip. We made a timeline to figure out the main places we want to visit, leaving extra days to allow for longer stays when desired and extra stops when needed [because spontineity is a must in my book, and Devin likes to organize and plan things :) ]. According to google maps it looks like the trip will be a total of 3,685 miles. Given the recent rise in gas prices we figure at $4 a gallon and 25 miles per gallon we will be spending $600 on gas total or $300 each. We hope to be spending very little on food and based on our recent road trip we have budgeted $20 per week each on groceries, which means $60 on food for the entire trip. [Details on how we plan to spend so little money on food to come!] On top of food and gas we will need money for recreational activities along the way including camping and national park entrance fees. We each plan on budgeting another $150 for that. The final and most important spendings will go towards the beer supply. With a 30 rack of Keystone Light at about $18, we will each budget $40 for beer. With gas, food, recreational fees and the beer supply we each need to save about $550. In order to hold each other accountable and save the money that we need we have created a Savings Jar decorated with a map of our tentative route and a record of the money we put in. We have both started the savings process by putting in an initial deposit of $100 each. We plan to save about $50 each week to accumulate the final $450 that we need for the trip.