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Hi Stacey
I think your budget looks ok. My daughter and I did a road trip across the USA in September. We had 3 weeks and 3 days from New York to San Francisco taking in 16 US states and part of Canada (5000 miles in all). We spent the first two days in New York then picked a hire car up in New Jersey for the road trip. Our flights were £1200 (UK to NYC return and a one way trip from San Fran to NYC). Car Hire from National was around £475 for the car, $250 for the one way drop off fee and around $390 for extra driver insurance (3 weeks hire). Petrol is much cheaper in the US. We did the whole 5000 miles on less than $500. We stayed in motels at around $70 to $80 per night for the room including taxes. We also stayed in a couple of youth hostels where you may get a better deal. I did find food to be more expensive than I had thought. If you are on the road it is cheaper to get coffee from the gas stations than to go somewhere like Starbucks. They have really good coffee machines in all the gas stations and often have pastries and things you can buy for breakfast. Also the supermarkets off the interstates have self service buffet style counters where you can get hot fried chicken and salad or soup and a roll etc for lunch. This is much cheaper than going to restaurants all the time. We took $3500 on a dollar card from FairFX and $700 in cash. We used the dollar card to pay for all petrol and hotels and then when the cash ran out we used the dollar card for everything. Just a word of warning if you use a prepaid dollar card for buying petrol you need to go to the kiosk to pay. The cards will not work at the pump. Hope this info is of some help to you. I hope you have a really great time.
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