Road trip across the US

Hey everyone,

My boyfriend and I are looking to do a road trip through all the states, apart from Alaska and Hawaii, some time in the future (we're hoping within the next year or so). There aren't many places online that show any routes through all the states so I was wondering if anyone could suggest the best route? We would like to start in Los Angeles and go from there.

Also, my boyfriend drives, so we were looking at whether we should rent or buy a car. We found a car on Ebay for £2000/$3000 but the problem with Ebay is that most of them are for auction and the fuel for 29,000 (approx) miles is well over $1000. Would it be better for us to rent or buy a car, then sell the car once we finish the road trip.

We live in England so we can't take the car with us, lol.

We were also wondering about where to stay. Do we stay in a motel or would it best for us to buy a caravan/motor home?

Any ideas and suggestions would be really helpful!

Thanks,
Anne-Marie.

Hello and welcome to the RTA forums !

There would be many ways/routes to visit each State and "best" will come down to many factors. What are your main aims for the trip ? How long have you got ? Is it a challenge or sight seeing trip ? These are the kind of things you need to work out to find what's best for you, the shortest, the most scenc, places you really want to visit and so on. You will find much info searching around the forums [just type 'all 48 states roadtrip' etc in to the search box] and you will come up with many threads like this one.

As a foriegn visitor it won't be easy to buy any type of vehicle and get it registered insured and so forth, [nigh on impossible]and it probably wouldn't be that economical if you were to do the trip within the 90 day visa waiver limits anyway. Renting a car and Motels would certainly be cheaper than an RV [campervan] would be, with just two of you paying the costs.

The great thing about the roadtrip is the freedom of the open road and going where you want, when you want, so I would suggest doing some research and purchasing a big map of the USA and start putting dots on places that appeal to you and start creating your own route. Once you have got started we can help 'fine tune' and answer other questions you might have.

Thanks for the welcome!

We really want to see the sights and the beautiful places as well as a challenge really. We don't really like highways/motorways and would rather take the country roads if possible.

I didn't think of insurance and registering the car to be honest, but then there's probably a few things I haven't thought about. My boyfriend is also 23 and I know that rental places add an extra charge for drivers under 25 which we knew about when we first thought about this.

I was thinking of the route as a zig zag, going up and down through the states without trying to cross the same state twice.

Thanks for the advice!

I have heard that if you book a car rental through a UK consolidator such as carhire3000.com, it is sometimes possible to get the underage surcharge waived.