A Californian Summer
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Road trips are my thing. I like listening to music, fresh air and long periods of inactivity in my legs. I’m pretty good at holding the urge to pee but mostly I just like the feeling of going back in time, doing things the old school way and living life on the fly. I get planes, I do. I need them to get from A to B, but if there’s ever a reason I don’t really need one, i’ll take the other option. Environmentally they are poison, I once had a panic attack on one, thanks to my mate claustrophobia and whilst grabbing a long haul business class bargain may be a experience worth the pain, a short economy class convenience trip is just a means to an end, and if i have the time and the option, I’m happy to trade.
You know that feeling you get when you press your head to the side of a window whilst listening to your favourite tunes and imagine yourself in a scene from a film? Well if you do, that’s me on a road trip. Shut your eyes with the wind in your face and I feel as close to satisfying my inner adventurer as i get. You don’t need to go to California to get this, so if it’s not in your budget, try anywhere you can drive to with some open roads that aren’t purely motorways. Scotland, The New Forest, Wales, Cornawall. There’s always somewhere to explore.
Road tripping with kids isn’t as painful as you think. For a start, it’s really important that they learn the ‘art of boredom’. Of doing nothing, entertaining themselves whatever you want to call it, but in our busy worlds I think sometimes they need to learn that waiting in queues and not being entertained constantly, are real life things people just need to deal with. You are literally giving them a life skill. Small children might cause you the need to stop a bit more frequently for toilet stops but there’s audio books, music, family car games and movies if you have a screen to download any onto! As i said its hardly an endurance test for them.
California was made for the road trip. It’s sunny disposition, raw natural beauty and diverse landscape with long stretches of open road, make for easy driving with an almost filmlike type of experience.
I’ve broken this trip down to 12 parts working through each stop on our route. There are so many different ways to make this trip work but i always start with the same planning formula on any trip in this order:
How many days I have in total
Where do I want to go/ how long do I need in each place? / what do I want to do in each destination?
Distance or time it takes to travel between the destinations and allowance for dead time like parking the car and checking in/familiarisation of a new room/hotel.
Cost on accomodation and travel for the whole trip split into an average cost per day/night. Remebering that in the US, they add taxes on when you check out!
This generally dictates how far you can go, for how long and how much you can spend. I then jiggle around days and things i want to do to make it more cost effective and allow for down time and i try and make sure some of the accomodation is moveable just in case we want to spend longer in any one place. I spend a great deal of time researching and finding accomodation that serves my design fetish. I refuse to waste money on average, ‘meh’ type hotels and houses and prefer to split my cash by staying in some really dream like often pricey places, balanced off with some much cheaper basic accomodation, still hopefully with some features i find aesthetically pleasing.
Starting off for us in San Francisco was dictated mainly by cost. Book flights early as possible and worry about your accomodation afterwards. Just make sure you have travel insurance from the start of your booking in case of any eventualities or worldwide pandemics! Flying in and out of LAX actually cost us more and we managed to blag business class seats for a relatively small increase becauase of the time, day and airports we were happy to travel from, also using some Virgin miles. To give you an idea about the price difference. The same seats and trip would have cost over £40,000 more for our family on a different day, time and airport destination. It’s wild.
LAKE TAHOE via SONOMA
YOSEMITE including BASS LAKE.
JOSHUA TREE/ YUCCA VALLEY
SAN DIEGO
DISNEYLAND CALIFORNIA AND UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
MALIBU
USA BASICS
Right now to enter the US you need an ESTA visa and have to apply online at least 72 hours before departure. It’s takes a while to submit these and they basically want to know everything bar the state of your left kidney and the colour of your bra. Don’t leave it til the last minute to fill this in. The queue for passport control here was very long also, which is not ideal after a long flight but it is what it is. It could have just been a bad day but in my experience, it’s not the friendliest of countries to arrive in. You might feel you are being treated as if you are a criminal, but I like to consider it as part of the travelling experience. Character building.
FAMILY ROOM HOTEL ALLOCATIONS
We like to stay in the same room as the kids on holidays because
a) it’s cheaper than paying for two rooms and
b) I sleep better knowing exactly where they are.
On this trip my kids were 10,12 and 8 so still small enough to top and tail in a bed together. Some hotels if booking through a computer don’t accept a family of 5 in one room and often automatically want to book you two rooms. Top tip: If you contact the hotel direct, they are often happy for you to cheat the system and allow you to alter the number of kids in your group to fit in a room, as long as they don’t have to provide an extra bed. It saves big families BIG money. If you are road tripping around it might even be worth buying a small roll up bed to put in the car in case they get fed up all the places they’ll be sharing!
First stop San Francisco!
