My roommate and I are planning a nine and a half day road trip from Michigan to California in March. We'd originally planned on the road trip having no real destination, and just have a spontaneous adventure, but we have started talking about actually driving all the way to California.

In order to go all the way to the coast in the time we have available, we would really have to make it a one-way drive and fly back home from California. We had already planned on renting a car (because our trucks are both leased and can't afford the mileage), so this isn't a problem. This idea sounds good to us, but there are a couple of problems I foresee that I'd like advice with.

1) This is definitely going to be more expensive, because we'll have to pay more to rent the car because we won't be dropping it off in the same place we picked it up. Does anyone know of rental car companies that charge a reasonable fee, have unlimited mileage, and don't charge extra to drop it off in a different place? Or does anyone have a good suggestion about how to keep that cost to a minimum? (I have no experience renting cars, so this may be a dumb question)

2) We had originally planned on taking camping equipment with us and doing a lot of camping on the road. With the flying back option, that's even more desirable because we'd save money on hotels... but we're concerned about what we'd do with the camping equipment once we had to fly home. We'd thought about shipping it home... does anyone have any suggestions?

Any general advice or thoughts about this kind of trip would be greatly appreciated. Neither of us have ever done anything like this before, so while we're really excited, we're also a little anxious and looking for any help we can find in terms of planning!

Thanks in advance.