Hello All,

This is my first post on this forum since discovering it a few days ago.

I have been agog with the useful tips and info that you chaps have provided and it's helping me loads with planning my first proper roadtrip to the USA.

I'm flying to San Francisco with my girlfriend for 2 weeks and looking to do a circle route out to Vegas via Yosemite, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, get married in Vegas, PCH 1 and back to SF. Picked up loads of info on all aspects of the trip from reading these pages, still have questions but propose to build on simple answers first and ask other questions in the relevant forum instead of asking loads of questions in one go.

The good news is we both managed to get the time off to fly from England to do the trip. The bad news is that it's all pretty last-minute and we're going to be arriving on 2 September, Labor Day weekend, so I expect everywhere will be havoc and booked up.

Get into SF airport about 6pm and looking to hire a car and escape the city immediately and head towards Yosemite (will do SF town for three days on the way back). We'll have had about 20 hours of plane and car journey by the time we touch down in SF so we'll be pretty tired and don't want to do that much driving that night.

We'd like to find a little village(?) along the route to spend the night. Nothing fancy just a place to lay the head and allow us to get on with it in the morning without having to find our way out of a town. From reading on here it looks like we'll be taking the 580, 205, 120 route which from SFO to Yosemite runs at 170 miles according to Streets & Trips so somewhere past the halfway mark would be good.

Anybody have any suggestions?

Also, with Labor Day weekend, are we actually going to be able to move on the roads out of SF on Saturday evening or will we be snarled up for hours?

Thanks to everybody on here who has already made posts, we've thoroughly enjoyed reading the info and it's helped us no end in planning our last minute trip.

Cheers,

Johnny