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Tag: One-Way Road Trip View All Tags

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Brits On An American Road Trip: A Dud Car Nightmare

August 19, 2009 at 1:04 PM | by londontown | 3 Comments

Planning a road trip? HotelChatter contributor London Town is on one from LA to New York at the moment. Some top tips from a week on the road…

If there’s one thing we Europeans know about Americans, it’s that you love your cars. We also know that your customer service is second to none (tell us to have a nice day when we’re over here, and our cold little British hearts will melt all over you).

So we were pretty confident about hiring a car for our road trip in the land of the free. We’ve done it before—we drove from Chicago to Nashville earlier in the year with Avis, and that worked out just fine. This time we were going further, though—LA to New York, to be precise. National came through with the least extortionate one-way fees, so we went with them.

Big mistake. We arrived at LAX late on a Wednesday night, jetlagged and extra cranky as United had managed to mislay our bag for a whole two hours, and at first we were pleasantly surprised at the ease of the pick up service. We literally signed the contract, and were told to choose a car and drive off. We chose a nice red Chevy and headed off. It wasn’t until we reached the interstate that we noticed it kept pulling to the right, trying to drive us off the road.

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Brits On An American Road Trip: Five Top Tips

August 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM | by londontown | 4 Comments

Planning a road trip? HotelChatter contributor London Town is on one from LA to New York at the moment. Some top tips from a week on the road…

Don’t plan ahead too far
On our last road trip, we planned our stops by the day, which made for guilt aplenty when we made unscheduled stops, and crazy-fast driving to make up the time. This time, we’ve sussed out accommodation options for where we want to be, and where we’ll likely be, and called from the road in the afternoon. As a result, we’ve had plenty detours and we’re all the better for it (if a week behind schedule).

Don’t rely on GPS
Yesterday, we asked our GPS to take us through Texas from Abilene to Austin, via Crawford, to stalk George Bush. It swore that the fastest route would go on the interstate through Fort Worth and take nine hours. Luckily, we looked at a map that showed that that would be like doing two sides of a triangle, ditched the GPS and went cross country. It took five hours.

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Four Days and 1,407 Miles Later, We Turn In The Rental Car

May 15, 2009 at 2:26 PM | by pbb | 1 Comment

Jaunted editor Paul Brady is back on terra firma in the U.S. after nearly a year away in South America. So how did he get back here? By taking the ultimate road-trip. All this week, he'll be telling us just how he did it. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know.

If 24 hours before, we'd been dreading a six-hour drive, the final leg of our one-way road trip started with a bit of melancholy of a different sort. Not because we'd been having a bad time but because it meant my trip--through South America, through the Gulf Coast and onward to Oklahoma--was about to end. It'd been so long since I'd stayed in one place, I didn't know what might happen when we arrived in Oklahoma.

But I put facing doubt about my future on hold while Pat Faser at the Fairfield Place served up a big plate of veggie frittata, sausage links, fresh fruit and a truly Southern biscuit alongside orange juice and coffee. I'd say the emphasis at this B&B was on breakfast if the bed hadn't been so comfortable.

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Driving From New Orleans to Shreveport, With a Stop for Beignets

May 14, 2009 at 11:42 AM | by pbb | 0 Comments

Jaunted editor Paul Brady is back on terra firma in the U.S. after nearly a year away in South America. So how did he get back here? By taking the ultimate road-trip. All this week, he'll be telling us just how he did it. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know.

Day three of our trip dawned, and my girlfriend and I woke with a sense of dread. Another 300+ miles to cover? And on this stretch, which a number of New Orleans natives told us was mind-meltingly dull? We needed a vacation from our Road Trip.

Luckily, breakfast in Nola was much better than it was at the Coombs House. After asking the all-knowing Twitter for a breakfast recommendation--trendy, right?--we headed to Morning Call in Metairie after @alexanderbasek pleaded "Do not miss." He didn't send us there for the extensive menu: You'll be having coffee and beignets like we did. But how tasty they were--and we might've been the only tourists in the crowd of cops, little old ladies and middle-aged men mentally drowning in their tiny porcelain cups. It was, as we'd hoped, the anti-Cafe du Monde.

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Driving From Apalachicola to New Orleans...with a Lunar Lander!

May 13, 2009 at 11:46 AM | by pbb | 0 Comments

Jaunted editor Paul Brady is back on terra firma in the U.S. after nearly a year away in South America. So how did he get back here? By taking the ultimate road-trip. All this week, he'll be telling us just how he did it. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know.

At nearly 400 miles, the second leg of our trip, from Apalachicola to New Orleans would clock in at more than six and a half hours, but on the upside--I thought, anyway--my girlfriend and I would get a killer breakfast from our hosts at the Coombs House Inn to start the day right. But though the sausage and apple stratta was tasty, the atmosphere in the deathly silent dining room was more chilly than a morgue in Siberia.

Eager to get on to a town with a bit more life to it, we set out for New Orleans, planning to stop for nothing but gas or bathroom breaks. But cruising past signs for the USS Alabama--presumably a battleship!--we were intrigued and decided, in true Road Trip style, to drop in. Totally. Worth. It.

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Driving From Orlando to Apalachicola... with Alligators!

May 12, 2009 at 3:02 PM | by pbb | 0 Comments

Jaunted editor Paul Brady is back on terra firma in the U.S. after nearly a year away in South America. So how did he get back here? By taking the ultimate road-trip. All this week, he'll be telling us just how he did it. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know.

When I was young and on a family vacation involving a rental car, my dad would spend at least 10 minutes in the garage after our interminable flight, getting acquainted with his temporary ride while my mom and I would moan and beg for him to get on the road already. Thanks to that childhood trauma, I never do that, even if it means I have to figure out how to work the car while doing 70 through a construction zone on choked Orlando highways.

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A Rental Car Road Trip on a Shoestring Budget

May 11, 2009 at 1:59 PM | by pbb | 6 Comments

Jaunted editor Paul Brady is back on terra firma in the U.S. after nearly a year away in South America. So how did he get back here? By taking the ultimate road-trip. All this week, he'll be telling us just how he did it. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know.

There's something uncanny about planning a one-way road trip through the southern United States from an internet cafe in Cartagena, Colombia. But plan ahead you must, if you want to take advantage of the incredibly cheap one-way rental car deals out of Florida on offer right now.

Why the bargains? As the companies gear up for summer road trip season, they realize all their inventory is at Florida airports, dumped there by snow bunnies who drove down for sun and fun but flew back home. By offering super-cheap rides to people like me--north-bound drivers with flexible travel plans--they can easily repopulate the country with rentals.

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