South- west USA Top Tips
Planning a fly drive to the south-west of the United States?
If you have plenty of spare time on your hands, you can spend time looking at maps, reading travel guides, booking hotels, booking flights, and gauging how far you are able to travel each day in order to be able to see as many places as you can in the time you’re there. Well, we thought we could do that, but in the end, life took over and we realised that we didn’t actually have the ‘spare time’ and it all seemed a bit of a daunting task.
We needed help to get us to the places we wanted to visit. So, we got in touch with Travel Counsellors, who came to see us in our home and chatted to us about where we would like to go and how long we had to do it in…there was no ‘hard sell’; the lady who visited us just said to leave it with her and she would come up with a plan for us.
The plan: 17 days/16 nights
About a week later, we went through a detailed plan, which included flights, hotels, and places where we needed to pre-book tickets, such as Alcatraz. With a few tweaks here and there, the holiday was booked for us. All we had to do was wait for the flight tickets and turn up at the hotels along our route.
How do you decide where to visit?
It seems a silly question, but when you’re visiting a country as vast as the USA, you have to be realistic and fit in as much as you can feasibly travel to in one day, and think about the route you want to take. Remember that you need to be at the airport in time for the return journey, so don’t get too carried away and drive too far! Travel Counsellors suggested to travel in a loop, so that you know you are heading back in the right direction toward the end of the holiday. We decided to go from California, to Arizona and Nevada and Utah, then start heading back to California. This was a round-trip of 2600 miles.
We bought a map of the west of the USA and laid it on the kitchen table. Using the internet for research and a book Travel Counsellors had given us by Lonely Planet (which was also really useful when we were actually in America), we wrote on post-it pads the places we would like to see and stuck them to the map. Then, we got down to actually planning the route on the roads we were going to drive down. We googled from one hotel to the next to see how far we needed to drive each day, so we knew what time we would reach our destination. By the time we had eaten breakfast, we found that we were setting off around 9.00 and travelling an average of 150 miles per day, and around 2.5 hours driving, so getting to each place around midday. Then, we would set off for the next hotel, and if we could see another place on the route, then that was a bonus!
Great places to visit in the west of the USA
Five of us (4 adults and one teenager) flew in mid-July from Gatwick to Los Angeles and decided to stay there for two nights. Don’t underestimate the size of LA, it is huge! Using open-top bus tours is a great way of sightseeing as it’s a ‘hop-on, hop-off’ system, which means you can see as much as you would like to, or as little, if you just want to pop in somewhere. There’s the obvious things to see, like the Hollywood sign and the studios, and Beverly Hills but there’s also the Griffin Observatory, Venice Beach, and the pier at Santa Monica, where there’s a sign showing the end of Route 66. From Los Angeles, we headed out to Palm Springs and took the revolving cable car up the mountain. You begin to realise the huge expanse of land around you, from miles of desert on one side, to the coniferous forests of the mountains, and how cool it is up there compared to the 30 degrees plus of Palm Springs itself.
I guess I could write a book about the sights we saw on our trip around the south-western states of the USA. Driving wasn’t boring in the slightest…the scenery is awe-inspiringly beautiful everywhere! Turn a corner and the vista can change in the blink of an eye.
There wasn’t a day when we didn’t see something spectacular; I could write a book about the things we saw and did, but I will just list a few highlights for you here: The Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, The Hoover Dam, Zion National Park, Death Valley, Las Vegas, Yosemite National Park, San Francisco, Monterey, Pebble Beach and The Big Sur, to name but a few.
5 Top Tips for a fly drive to south-west USA: • Prices there are tax free, so remember it will be added on at the till • Tips are usually required – around 20% of the bill • Temperatures change quite quickly depending on altitude, or cold air currents from the Pacific, so take something warm to wear, too: we found San Francisco was quite chilly due to cold air currents from Alaska, even in July. • Buy plenty of water and keep a stock of it in the boot of the car. You will be in blistering heat, at times – it was 52 degrees in Death Valley! • Make sure you start the day with a full tank of fuel – it can be a long way between fuel stations, particularly in the desert areas.
The sights you will see are wondrous and breath-taking – not one day went by without us seeing something remarkable.
We highly recommend visiting south-west USA; it will open your eyes and inspire you.
Written by Brenda Coltman ( A very happy customer)