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The Finance planner:
Please keep in mind that it is always a good idea to have a general plan so you have a good direction for your trip. But remember that every trip is a chance for a new adventure filled with memories and Magnets.
Christopher and I decided to sit down together and create a tentative plan for our trip. We started with the basics and looked at Google Maps and picked the best route that would best suit our needs for the trip. One of the the things we both agreed on was that we did not want to travel through Los Angles at any cost. We found a route that traveled more north and would take us 1,533 miles and about 26 hours. Then after we had the basic outline that Google maps provided we set out on deciding how many days we wanted to take to get to San Angelo.
I had a few other detail that I had to figure out to get to the final decision on how many days: How many Miles will we get per a tank and how many hours will it take to travel between cities where we plan to get gas? The miles we wanted to travel in a day was a little bit more tricky because we did not want to travel too much one day and too little the next.
My Formula for guessing the gas mileage was simple*
Miles Per Gallon X Gallons Per Tank = Miles Per Tank
Our formula came our to be 10mpg X 40gpt = 400mpt, since we were using 14' Uhaul Truck. If you are looking for the data you need most site will have it listed for each type of vehicle on their websites. If you are not positive make sure to ask when you are reserving your truck
I used this formula to figure out approximately how many stops we would have to make for gas and it came out to be 4 or 5 stops. That's when I went back to our original map and started looking for cities every 350 miles to be on the safe side.
We decided to get gas in:
Pacific Grove, California
Barstow, California
Flagstaff, Arizona
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Lubbock, Texas
After I had figured out our Gas Cities and the hours between them we collaborated on where would be the best cities for over night stays. We decided on two cities pretty evenly separated with one Gas stop in between which ended up being Kingmen, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
With this new information we settled on a three day trip.
Day 1 - 560 miles
Day 2 – 471 miles
Day 3 – 529 miles.
Now that we have our plan and our many city stops we can now get into the Financial part of this segment. Please remember that gas and hotel prices can change daily and you need to factor in additional expenses so you can avoid any overcharges.
I started with researching Hotel Nightly rates. The is no real reason as to why I did that first I just wanted to tackle the shorter list first. I personally used Hotels.com to find prices but any travel site (Priceline, Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity). The prices in Kingmen averaged to be $40-50 a night and Albuquerque was $50-60 a night. I add the two highest amounts to have our budget but I also added an additional $20 just in case.
We used Cheap-gasprices.com to find the gas prices. I suggest adding at least 10 cents to each make sure any spikes in prices are covered. Gas in every city was never more that $3.75.
*** To look at the Formula for the gas mileage, I have one small change. After getting on the road Christopher and I realized that we were not getting the MPT that we originally prepared for so this is the new formula.
(MPG X GPT ) - 200 = MPT
We live and we learn
