My Grand Adventure By the Numbers*
My route.
*Not including the week I spent with my parents
Days: 16
Nights: 15
Miles driven: 2,558
Hours on the road: 47
States visited: 9
Cities visited: 12
Gas money: $174.42
Total expenditure: $977.43
I am a creature of contradictions. I like planning by the fly, but I also like keeping accurate, up-to-date lists and charts while traveling. During my two-week trip, I duly recorded:
-Gas money
-General expenses (food, museum admissions, tours, souvenirs, etc.)
-Daily travel log
-Average nightly spending on lodgings ($30/night because I was hosted in so many places)
-Average daily spending ($55/day)
Why? I don’t know. I didn’t budget any specific amount of money for my trip, and I didn’t have any particular idea of how much anything would cost or how much I would spend. Nor was I particularly eager to create a budget for my next trip (which is shaping up, by the way, to cost more than double my first). I was just curious. I just like to know. I even kept receipts, which will all, almost definitely, go straight into the trash when I clean out my notebook.
I keep careful records for unknown reasons.
So what do I do with this information? Well, let’s take a look.
First of all, I DROVE 2,558 MILES?! I sure did. I made a painstaking list of virtually every drive I took and totted up all the numbers. And it turned out that in my car I had covered over 2,500 miles of America in two weeks. That’s insane. (Can that be right? Yes, I just added everything up again.)
Driving straight from New York to West Palm Beach covers approximately 1,250 miles. I did double that. For comparison’s sake, you could get from New York to Las Vegas in 2,550 miles. You could get 90% of the way across the country!
I spent 47 hours on the road. That is nearly two entire days of driving. Of staring at the road, merging, switching lanes, passing trucks. I have to say, I really enjoyed the driving. The longer drives - the nine-hour one, for example, but anything above five hours, really - were less enjoyable, for sure. The sweet spot was 2-5 hours. My favorite drive was absolutely the one from Savannah to Dunnellon, Florida, which was 4.5 hours. As I watched the outside temperature steadily climb upwards, as I made my way through hills and valleys, as I left the highway, jumped onto a state road and began driving past gorgeous, green farms, fields and forests dappled in the afternoon light, as my favorite song came on shuffle and I played it four times on repeat, I was so happy to be alive and driving.
Driving (my phone was in the dock! Was not using it!!!)
My least favorite drive was obviously the nine-hour slog from Bethesda to Gatlinburg, which was hellish from beginning to end. Between the pounding rain, the tire pressure fiasco, and that absolutely terrifying pitch-black journey through a spooky, sharply winding forest road at night, the LAST thing I needed was to end up at the world’s sleaziest motel. Alas. That was not a highlight.
But apart from that - and apart, generally, from the last hour or two of any particularly long drive - I really loved it. I felt in control, independent, powerful. I felt that I was the master of my fate, carving my way confidently through the nation’s mighty highways. I didn’t feel the need for company, or a second driver with whom to trade places, though I’m sure if I had one, I would have appreciated the freedom to gaze more fully at the passing scenery. That, and the aforementioned feeding issue, were the only things that might have made a companion welcome. Otherwise, I loved it. I felt free - I felt autonomous. I decided where I went and when. No waiting for buses, no begging for rides, no coordinating cars. Just driving, itself, was a catalyst for happiness.
States visited. If we’re being fair, I really only “visited” six states, not nine: Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. New Jersey, Delaware, and North Carolina were just pass-throughs. I don’t know where most people hold on this machloket. Can I say nine states if I’m including drive-throughs? If I stopped in the state to get gas or visit a rest area, does that count?
And what about cities? Are we talking about places where I stopped, enjoyed local culture and sights, got a feel for the place, or are we also including towns that I physically went to, but didn’t really explore, such as St. Petersburg, where Bernice lives, or Sanford and Lorton, the on- and off- stops for the Auto Train? If we’re counting everything, here’s my tally:
Bethesda, MD
Washington, D.C.
Gatlinburg, TN
Pigeon Forge, TN
Charleston, SC
Savannah, GA
Dunnellon, FL
St. Petersburg, FL
West Palm Beach, FL
Boca Raton, FL
Sanford, FL
Lorton, VA
Money. Because of the generosity of relatives and friends, this trip ended up being very cheap. The biggest single expenditure was obviously lodging; since seedy motels wouldn’t do, I ended up spending about $70 per on the nights I stayed in hotels. However, I only had to pay for a room for six nights out of the 15 that I was on the road. For the first two nights, I stayed with a friend; another two, at the Charleston Shabbos house; one night was spent at a Chabad house in Boca; and a further four were spent at my Nana’s house in West Palm Beach. I was able to save quite a bit as a result. (Yet I still spent almost $400 for those six nights!!!)
Plus, I barely spent any money on food, as there was pretty much no food to buy. Aside from a kosher cookie or ice cream place here or there, and that pizza place in Boca, there was nothing, and I had brought a ton of snacks which kept me going pretty much all the way through. There’s a perk of kosher travel, I guess!
Here’s the rough breakdown of spending:
Lodging - $377
Tourist attractions - $184
Souvenirs - $175
Gas - $174
Food - $40
Misc - $27
-----------------------
Total - $977
Less than $1,000 for a two-week road trip is not bad, I think (though again, I really don’t know).
My next trip, out west, looks like it will cost MUCH, MUCH more - not because of airfare (relatively affordable) but because it is apparently ridiculously expensive to get a rental car. I just found that out today while researching the trip and I’m really bummed. It’s like $50 PER DAY, not including taxes or gas or anything else. The total cost for JUST the car would be over $1,000 for two weeks! Plus however much I spend on gas. THAT’S INSANE. I don’t know what to do.
I had the idea of camping out to save money on hotels, but, shockingly, my parents weren’t on board. Still, that might be what I have to do in order to make this trip possible. Spending $3,000 for two weeks is frankly beyond bonkers. And I refuse.
So I think this time, I’ll make a budget - $2,000 max. It still seems like a really ridiculous amount of money and I’m angry that I’ll have to shell out over a grand JUST TO HAVE A CAR FOR TWO WEEKS.
Still, you can’t put a price on soul-searching, new experiences, blah blah blah. On the other hand, yes you can and it’s $3,000.