Does anyone have any suggestions on how to estimate the cost of a family vacation that includes drive from San Diego to SF, with stops at San Diego Zoo, Disney (1-2 days), Monterrey Aquarium, Hearst Castle, some beach time, and perhaps a city tour of SF?
california vacation costs
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That is something that is fairly easy to research online. You can visit all of those sites and get prices on admission, book your hotel stays and car rental if you will have one and then add it all together. The part where it gets hard to estimate is food because food tends to expensive(paid around $15.00 a day for a breakfast buffet per person). If you want to keep to a tighter budget you just need to give yourself an approx amount that you want to spend on food each day. Planning a trip myself going San Fran to San Diego stopping in Monterey, Santa Barbara and Santa Monica along the way and just hotels and airfare is costing us about $3,000 for 2 weeks. We are staying in mostly marriotts and a couple of nice to really nice bed and breakfasts.
You're going to have to do some thinking on this one, your budget being most important. You'll have the cost of each attraction (which is often fixed and high), transportation, hotels and food. I'd suggest you get a guide book to California. We used "Where to Take the Kids in California." It was great. Also, Fodors, Frommers and others have good ideas.
Hotel and food costs are the easiest to reduce. You can find good hotels most everywhere for under $200/night. Some may be much less.
If you have specific questions re choices in certain cities, with the number of people in your family, ages of kids, budget, you might find more help on this web site.
Another thing to think about is that most hotels will have parking fees which can add on a fair amount to your hotel stay. In San Fran we will pay about $30 a night plus tax to park a car, in Monterey the fee at our B&B is around $12, not sure about Santa Monica, San Diego is around $15 a night for self parking at our hotel.
I usually buy Frommer's books when traveling. Just bought Frommer's California 2003 and it has a lot of great info in it but I have already noticed that a couple of the admission prices listed in the book were not entirely accurate, not off by too much though. Frommer's also has a book just for that drive along the pacific coast but I thought I would get more out of the other one.