Late April-May Roadtrip from Western Canada to American Southwest and Back

Quote:

Originally Posted by Southwest Dave

If you decide to do Antelope canyon I personally would book a tour in advance, especially as you are on a bit of a time crunch. Your trip along the coast looks just fine although you still won't make it to Santa Cruz in 5 hours when taking the coast road. LOL ! You will always stumble across things that you hadn't planned for and maybe not make it to some that you have planned for, but that's what makes the road trip great !

Bend OR would make a good first night stop, or you could consider stopping earlier and have time to take a 'peak' at Crater Lake with Spokane a good 'target' for night 2.

Sorry, I have no idea about the border crossing and foods.

Okay we'll look into booking the tour! And would allowing 6 or so hours to get to Santa Cruz be fine? I suppose at that point in the trip we don't have any reservations made either so that we can stay flexible with plans.

As far as Crater Lake goes, I was looking it up and it looks awesome! However, alot of the sources say that it has a ton of snow and most hotels/campgrounds in the area don't even open until late May..so we may have to take a raincheque on that one! We may adjust the route to go up through Eureka though--just a thought.

This is really important though; I've heard conflicting things about checking into hotels. From Canada, my boyfriend and I are both legal "adults" but we are not yet 21. Some sources said that you won't be able to book a hotel room in your are not over this age. I called a Best Western in Idaho and they said it was fine as long as I had a driver's license and credit card, while Lemon Tree Inn in Santa Barbara said that they can't let me stay there unless I have valid ID and am over 21 (though he said it depends on how much the places enforce it, and making reservations through a 3rd party site in advance may let us slide, but we aren't wanting to stick to such a strict schedule of reservations in CA). Any advice or experience with this? It's very inconvenient..