And one final thing for now:
I will reply to all of your brilliant suggestions/advise individually when I've learned a little more about each of them myself..
I do have one more question for now though, and it's about money : (
We were hoping to complete the whole trip for around £6000 ($9600 at the current exchange rate, at which we have already bought some dollars) for the two of us. The flights and the car rental will probably take away just under a half of that. So we would have maybe $5000 for the petrol/tolls/hotels/food/etc.
Does that sound reasonable, or are we kidding ourselves? We could spend more, but in that case our wives would surely start to voice their opposition to the whole trip... So we're looking to keep the costs down.
Thanks again for all your input!
Subman