It was always my dream to do a longish drive across America.
Roadtrip movies have always fascinated me and on previous visits to the US, taking the wheel from a friend or the occasional rental from Budget car only served to tantalize and leave me wanting more! So when we zeroed in on California as our vacation destination in May 2013, I seized the opportunity to make a roadtrip of it.
My family knows my obsession with driving but there were the usual apprehensions about adjusting to the "wrong" side, whether my Indian license/IDP would be accepted, jetlag and travel fatigue, etc. However the only real thing that bothered me was not having a backup driver. The missus drives decently enough over here but said she was not confident of doing it on American shores. When her brother and mom agreed to join us on the road, it finally solved that problem. Gautam has recently started working in the Bay Area after completing his Masters degree and when he procured his driving license in the spring we breathed a sigh of relief.
Of course I am loathe to share the driver's seat especially when some awe-inspiring trails are planned to be driven on, but it never hurts to have back-up!
So off I went, planning the trip in my usual way: looked up Tripadvisor reviews; identified good hotels en route with some basics like breakfast, wi-fi etc.; spoke to some friends and relatives based over there to get a feel of how many days to devote where...and soon we had a working itinerary ready. I started scouting websites for cheap airfares to the US. These days you can pretty much do everything online and by March I had bookings in place for BOM-SFO-BOM and almost all the overnight destinations we had planned.
The initial plan was to take a flight to Las Vegas and start driving there. SFO-->LV flights were plentiful and reasonably cheap (about $100 a head). But G had done a roadtrip to Vegas recently and was raving about how great the experience was, so I got caught up in the excitement and planned the entire trip by road. So we would drive from San Francisco to Las Vegas, spend a couple of days there, drive to neighbouring Arizona to see the Grand Canyon (which I had never seen on previous trips), then drive to LA to attend G's graduation. And, of course, see Disneyland. Ever since my 7-year old found out that we were going there, she could talk about nothing else!
From LA to SFO we figured would be a straight drive we could complete in a day. But veteran Navin advised me to take my time and slowly meander our way up the Pacific Coastal Highway, so that is what we decided to do. Viddy had done a similar trip last year and he endorsed this heartily.
After returning to the Bay area, we had friends and relatives to catch up with but I managed to find a 2-night window and schedule a drive up to Lake Tahoe. May is pretty much off-season (winter snows have melted so the skiing crowd stays away, and it's a little early for summer vacation) and I managed to get some pretty spiffy rates from the Marriott at South Lake Tahoe.
I did a rough calculation of the driving involved and figured it would be well above 2000 miles. Broke it up into manageable chunks but still ended up with two sectors (SFO-->Las Vegas and Sedona--> Phoenix-->LA) that would be around 500 miles each, to be covered in a single day. A daunting prospect but one that excited me as well.
Passports and visas were checked and double-checked, foreign exchange and travel insurance procured, leave applied for...and we were set!