USA Roadtrip!

[WashingMatilda]

My DP and I are going to West coast of USA from late October for 17 days.

It's something we have both wanted to do all our lives and are really excited so just checking in with the MN geniuses for any tips or must sees.

We stay in Vegas for 5 days, then drive up to San Francisco for 5 days, then ending in LA for the rest.

We've got Alcatraz booked and want to see the grand canyon whilst in Vegas, and will be driving through death valley.

Any tips of any one of these places would be very helpful!

We've just done some of this trip. No one has yet mentioned that Big Sur is closed and has been since last year. We had to drive on the motorway bit until Santa Barbara, wasn't scenic but we made it to LA

Tripadvisor have a road trip thread which you might find useful

acrossthesea yeah just saw this, is it the whole of it or just parts?? Will look into it more, thank you.

Lucy will do, thank you!

We'd love to catch a comedy or drag act show in SF, has anyone got any recommendations? There seems to be so many....

@WashingMatilda it's the whole bit that's called "Big Sur", the rest of Highway 1 is open after Santa Barbara but that's not called Bog Sur and it's not particular scenic.

There was a mud slide last year and again this year and the park service doesn't have the budget to fix the bridges and make it safe again. I think some bits are open to hikers but no cars.

Book when you're there - easier to get recommendations. Another point, when your driving the interstates, exit numbers refer to the distance to the end of that interstate. The is, don't go 1,2,3 but 5, 17,23 etc. It was really confusing for me.

That is, not the is

Sorry to drip feed, but stuff keeps on occurring to me. When you get off the plane, if you've pre booked your rental car, the rental company will try and persuade you to upgrade. And when you're jetlagged you are more vulnerable. Wherever we'very gone has been in a boring 4 door saloon and it's worked out fine.
However,try and get a deal on sat nav. We were told we would have to pay $10 a day to have it. Now and again it would have been handy, but not $10 every day.

Re Big Sur we had horrendous storms earlier in the year that firstly broke the bridge and then caused an additional 13 acres of land to be added to the coastline and completely covered the road.

They are working on it, but it won't reopen until June 2018 at the earliest. so you have to miss out a huge amount of the beautiful coast road unfortunately.

Just take your own satnav with you.

Not a tip on the location but the best piece of advice I can give is to buy a cheap cool box before you start your drive, especially if you're going to drive through Death Valley. We got a polystyrene one from Target and a huge tray of bottled water (cost about $10 all in). Fill up the cool box weigh ice from the Vegas hotel before you leave and chuck a load of water bottles in there and keep rotating!
We drove non stop Vegas to San Francisco via Death Valley, Yosemite and Mono Lakes all in one day (13 hours!) in mid September and the ice cold water was brilliant.
Also, you don't need to pay extra for a car with built in Sat nav. We used Wi-Fi in the hotels to get our route up each day before we set off, and then put the phones onto airplane mode. The GPS still works but there's no chance of getting charged for any data.
Have fun!

I wish we had thought of the sat nav tip!

Don't do what we did on the Pacific coast highway. We knew parts of it were closed, but we assumed that there would be regular turnings off it and the closures would be well signposted, there aren't and they weren't. We ended up driving thirty miles down it only to have to turn around and drive thirty miles back, and because of this we missed our pre paid and pre booked tour of Hearst castle. Not our finest hour.

These tips are brilliant, thanks so much for them all!