November 27, 2022
With today marking the start of our second big road trip together, it only seemed fitting to revisit our first.
The summer after graduating high school, Dan and I went on a three and a half week long road trip around the US. Fun fact: we actually started planning this trip about a month after we started dating. Not necessarily the best idea, but it was an incredible trip.
Back in 2016 Airbnb was a relatively new (or at least relatively newly popular) phenomena and muuuuuch more affordable than it is now. That fact, along with our many friends and family who generously hosted us, made it possible for us to do the trip. Opting to camp in a couple of places was also a helpful way to save money.
Dan and I each saved up $1000, made a detailed budget, and made it work! We brought a huge suitcase full of food to help save money as well, and thankfully (somehow?!) neither of us drank coffee at that point so there were no $6 lattes to add to the budget. We got a souvenir or two from each place that we stopped (minus just a few) and made the most of the one or two days we stayed in each place.
Our Google Doc for the trip was 15 pages long including a detailed itinerary, packing lists, budget, a mapped out route, ideas of what to do in each place, and receipts. I think even our parents were impressed. 😉 One very important detail we completely forgot about until days before our trip was…time zones. So we added a time zone map to our document and updated the times we planned/hoped to arrive at each stop.
Somehow the long drives rarely turned boring as we passed time listening to music, talking, and playing on the road games. It’s a bit of an odd one and it’s been a while since we’ve tried it, but we played a lot of hangman. It was an added challenge for the driver to have to keep track of where the correctly guessed letters were placed without being able to see it, but that added an element of hilarity as the guesses got sillier and sillier. Mad Libs was another go-to classic.
These were all of our stops:
Check out our reel for more pictures! Some of our favourite moments were hiking & camping in the Grand Canyon, the San Antonio River Walk, and randomly finding ourselves at the center of a Blue Angels show on Pensacola Beach! Getting the chance to see so many family and friends made the trip even more unforgettable <3
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