Spontaneous road trip across America
 

Hello all,

This is my first post on here, so apologies if it doesn’t really fit with the general theme of the forum.

My name is Liam, and I’m 18-year-old student from Surrey. Despite traveling never really being a thing that appealed to me growing up, a few months ago I started to develop a longing to explore the world. I holidayed in America last summer – a country I’ve always been fascinated with – and I’ve been desperate to go back ever since. My family and drove across about half of California, stopping off at San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Monica, San Diego and back up to LA, but now I want to see more.

I’m about to take my A-Levels for the final few months of my college education, and I will be spending my gap year working on a personal start-up project. However, in the not too distant future I want to start thinking about raising some money, getting a group of like-minded people together (preferably 18-20ish) and drive across the USA. I want to see more than just America in my life, obviously, but this is how I want to start.

It’s ambitious and at the moment nothing more than a pipe dream, but if anyone has any advice for me or fancies coming along for the ride, it would be great to hear from you, even if it’s so I can start to get a better idea of how to go about doing this.

First check age requirements for renting a car. And you need to be aware that if you return the car to a different location, you'll pay a large drop off fee.
I would recommend that you fly between different regions of the country or possibly take a train between some areas such as Washington DC /Philadelphia/NYC/Boston.
Look at Southwest Airlines. The USA is huge compared to the UK and I know from experience that there are huge areas you would have to drive through that are flat and boring.

I applaud your enthusiasm!

There are a couple of issues.

The hard one is that it is difficult to impossible for a person under 25 to rent an automobile.

It is then not inexpensive to do a one way rental, whatever one's age. So you have got to drive a circular route through a very large country, much of which consists of the "flyover states", places so boring that no one should have to drive through them.

You are going to need a month to six weeks just to hit the high spots. You may want to,limit yoursel to a particular region on this trip: the US East coast from Maine to South Carolina; the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego; the Rocky Mountains from Santa Fe to the Canadian border, or something like that.

I would look at the Thorn Tree Forums to see how other people your age have solved the transport problem. greyhound and Trailways busses (intercity coaches) are a tradition for the impecunious, and I know anecdotally of people buying cars and selling them on after the trip. At the moment, I am in the far end of nowhere, a place where towns are 40 miles apart, and we met at least 6 cyclists and one (completely mad) walker complete with poles in a hundred mile stretch of excruciatingly boring country, and it was not in the west.

Many of us are a bit wrinkly to give good answers. In my day, we hitchhiked. Cant do it any more. But you will find a way. The good news is that food and lodging will be much cheaper than at home.

Good luck on the A Levels!

As other have said your biggest challenge is renting a car if under 25. But I'm sure you'll find a solution to that.
I'd suggest breaking the trip into segments, getting a rental car at a base city and returning to the same city before flying or taking the train (not as many options as the UK or Europe) to next base. Just a few possible bases...
Boston for New England
New York City- but without a car
Ralegih, NC for the South/Southeast
Indianapolis for the Midwest
Colorado Springs for the Rockies and Southwest
Boise, ID for the Mountain Northwest
Portland for the rest of the Northwest
You might look at leaving the car on the outskirts of majr cities you want to visit that have decent public transit such as Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, etc.
Sound like a great experience. Do it while you can.

Great idea for travel. If you are able to recruit a friend or family member in the mid to late 20s for the trip, you will solve the car rental issue.

Look at the map of the U.S. and compare it with your interests for planning the trip. If you want to spend most of your time in the rugged outdoors, maybe plan around our Western national parks and start in Seattle, over to Yellowstone, down to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains and end up in southern Utah and then the Grand Canyon and fly out of Phoenix. For city architecture, New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. are hard to beat. A lot of people enjoy the music, food and general ambiance of the South, so you could do a NYC or Boston to Florida/Miami trip, with D.C. and Nashville in between.

Have fun with the planning and use the forum to ask specific questions when you are ready. Also research the weather carefully for when you plan your trip, because we can get some crazy winter storms in the north and REALLY hot weather in the south.

well since you have time to plan on would spend it doing as much resarch as possible so you can hone in on the places that you really want to see based on

1)overall interests
2) time of year and weather - don't do the north in winter or the south in summer
3) start investigating cities you can do without a car (very difficult to rent if you are under 25), although you may find a coupe of places that will do so
4) start investigating hostels - and where they are most convenient - or hotel rates may be a major issue
5) Also, many hotels will not rent to a group of under 21s (too much experience with destruction by spring breakers)

Some of the hostels are very large ( 200 plus people) and even offer group activities that provide interesting budget options

But basically public transit - only really available in some of the larger cities - is your friend in terms of cost and convenience

I was lucky to have grown up in a family that explored the US every weekend in a Volkswagen camper. I have taken my kid cross country several times. I don't 'vacation'... I 'roadtrip'.

A rental car, train, bus or whatever works. I say do it!

I work around teenagers and when telling of my adventures they sigh and reply..."I would love to do that one day.". Others say they've never been out of the state. I just SMH.

I invited my daughter's friend one Summer and her reply was, "I'll eat dirt and drink rainwater if I have to, but I'm coming!"

Never look back and wish you would have lived your dream. Go for it!

That being said, lol, here is what I would do if I were in your shoes. http://www.trekamerica.com/

You can join a group of young adults and see as much of the USA as you wish for as long as you wish. You stay in hotels, hostels and camp. I would just have trouble deciding which trip to book. Enjoy!

OK just checked and Enterprise Car Rentals will rent to 18 year olds. Take a look at rentalcars.com (used to be carhire3000.com) as they will include insurance and can often get oneway dropoff fees waived on popular routes such as SF to LA or LV. You will still have to pay the underage fee though.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'll start planning and probably try and update every few months on the latest progress. http://www.trekamerica.com/ looks good though.

Liam, my nephew worked as a camp counsellor in his gap year. Afterwards he delivered a couple of cars to various places in the US, his age(18) wasn't an issue for that, and he had stacks of invites to stay. He took the Greyhound bus once, and Amtrak too, plus a couple of cheap flights to take up some of those invites.
Maybe you could consider that as an option.