0:Calm Before the Storm

NYC, Flatiron Building.

15th October 2019.

It’s never a good sign when you wish you put in more overtime at work.

My girlfriend, Martha, and I were a few days away from traveling America, and I’m worried about funds. I hadn’t exactly done anything like this before. In fact, the furthest I had ever driven was to my Grandparents in the Wirral, from Gloucester, which is roughly a 2-hour 30-minute drive.

To a British person that’s a long way. Anything over 30 minutes is considered a long way and possibly not worth the hassle. Despite this, in a couple of days I was set to get on a plane with Marfs, who hates flying, land in Los Angeles, and then drive a 25ft RV across America and (hopefully) end up in New York in 6 week's time.

Hidden costs for these trips have always been a problem for me. When Martha and I traveled through Scotland there were hidden costs all over the car hire, so I was on a mission to make sure that wasn’t going to happen again.
As this was a new experience for us we decided to go through STA to organise the trip. In hindsight, I would probably avoid them now.

Despite asking in person and emailing about hidden costs, a few days before our departure, there were costs flying in. Obviously.
Originally Martha and I had planned to start our adventure in New York City and then make our way to L.A. We were then told there was a £600 one-way fee, but we could avoid that if we went in the opposite direction.

This was due to the demand for RVs starting in NYC. So the idea was, we would be taking an RV back to a Cruise America site that was high in demand. Therefore, avoiding the one-way fee. However, for some reason, I decided to triple-triple-check. That's like... 9 checks, and we were told by STA that there was now a one-way fee.
Yeah, nice one.

That was pretty annoying as we changed our whole plan to go in the opposite direction at their recommendation.

After some strong words from me, well Martha, they decided to come to a sweet, sweet deal…

They would halve our one-way fee to £300, which sounds O.K, It was better than nothing, I was a little happier…

…but take away our cutlery and bedding.

We would then need to hire cutlery and bedding from Cruise America, which in total cost £200.

If my maths is correct that’s a saving of £100.

Brilliant.

I’m not sure who’s at fault for the childish games, but STA didn’t do a good job with communicating with Cruise America and ourselves.

It was slightly annoying and my reasoning for wishing I worked more.

One positive did come out of this and it was a lifesaver! In my panic, as I was now £500 worse off for this trip, I did some research into cheap RV sites and how to find them.

PASSPORT AMERICA!

Passport America is an absolute must and it saved our lives.

I went through a mixed bag of emotions when reading up on it. At first, I was ecstatic, we would save 50% on RV sites.

Then I felt crappy as they send you a Passport America card via Post and it made it seemed like we needed the card on us. At this point, we were literally traveling in less than 24-hours.

So that card isn’t going to come through in time.

Martha took over at this point and actually read the information on the website. Anything smaller than the heading I tend to ignore. #Guilty.

They have an App! Yay. So we got our Passport America membership and honestly, it saved us more than £1000 on RV sites across the 6 weeks. Crazy how close we got to go without knowing what it was.

The App also has a map that shows all the campsites/RV parks that accept the Passport America discount. We used this for 90% of the places we stayed at. The price is also clearly shown.

We called up and booked our first campsite at 10 PM the evening before flying out. Having a place to stay and a destination to go to did settle my mind.