Need advice for roadtrip mid October

[Henrik]

Hi all,

My wife and I are planning a roadtrip in Arizona and California in mid October.

So far the plan is:

Arrival in Phoenix (from London)
Phoenix to Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon to Las Vegas
Las Vegas to Death Valley to Sequoia to Yosemite
Yosemite to San Francisco
San Francisco to LA (where we depart back to London)

We are still in doubt whether we should rent a car for the entire trip, or wait until we get to California - we heard the drop off charge is high if you leave the car in another state.

We have 2 weeks for the trip - do you think this is enough or will it be too rushed?

Any thought and ideas on our trip appreciated, as we just started planning.

Thanks

Henrik

[Mark Sedenquist]

My wife and I are planning a roadtrip in Arizona and California in mid October.

Welcome to the Great American RoadTrip Forum! In my view, October is the perfect month for roadtrips in North America.

We are still in doubt whether we should rent a car for the entire trip, or wait until we get to California - we heard the drop off charge is high if you leave the car in another state.

The drop-off charges are determined by a variety of issues and some companies have fairly liberal policies. For ease of use, I would recommend keeping the same car for the two weeks.

We have 2 weeks for the trip - do you think this is enough or will it be too rushed?

For such a route, you could easily spend two months and only see a fraction of what is out there. That being said, time is pretty elastic and the great thing about a roadtrip is that you get to decide how much time to spend where. But I think you are trying to do too much -- I would scale it back to Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Yosemite. The route between Las Vegas and San Francisco is discussed here frequently -- there are over 600 posts (use the search utility).

Happy Planning!

Mark

[RoadTripper Brad]

Welcome aboard Henrik!

I agree with Mark. 2 weeks (not sure if you mean 14 days exactly) may be just a little short for visiting all the places. You could still "see" death valley though, as in driving through it to Seqouia. So, technically you could still be able to cross that off your list

This is sort of what I envision as a timetable, or at least one that I would have if following the route with the same amount of time.

Day 1: Phoenix to Grand Canyon
Day 2-3: Visiting Grand Canyon
Day 4: Grand Canyon to Las Vegas
Day 5: Visiting Vegas
Day 6: Vegas to Seqouia via Death Valley
Day 7 - 8: Seqouia
Day 9: Seqouia to Yosemite
Day 10 - 12: Yosemite
Day 13: Yosemite to SF
Day 14: San Francisco, depart for the UK.

-Brad