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We scored a 50% discount on an Airbnb in Colorado, but driving across half the country got old pretty fast. Here’s why I’d keep the trip shorter next time.
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For several years, I had the idea that I wanted to go on an extended road trip with my family, staying at Airbnbs along the way, all while I continued to write for work.
Fortunately, my wife was on board with this wild idea, and when she was about to start homeschooling our kids, we decided it would be a good time to give our idea a try.
The plan was pretty simple. We’d sell our house after the end of the school year, spend the summer staying in Airbnbs, and assess if we wanted to keep the road trip going when the fall began. Instead of using savings or relying on credit cards for the journey, I would work as usual, and we’d go sightseeing on the weekends or occasionally take some weekdays off.
We were fortunate enough to spend time doing everything from hiking the Rocky Mountains, watching a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, and spending a week roaming around St. Augustine, America’s oldest city.
It was an amazing adventure — and I’d never do it again.
Travel fatigue set in pretty fast
While we didn’t backpack across Europe or experience jet lag, the constant moving around started to get old after a couple of months.
We wanted to travel light, so everything we had for our family of four over the months-long trip had to fit in the back of our Honda CR-V. And while Honda does a good job of making a roomy compact SUV, we still had a lot of packing and unpacking every time we pulled up to a new Airbnb rental.
After a few months, some excitement of visiting a new town or seeing a new place to stay wore off. While we made sure to make visiting family and friends part of the road trip, it still got lonely being on the road by ourselves for several months.
It takes a lot of constant planning
Since we didn’t know how long we would be traveling, we kept the schedule of places we would stay pretty open. We knew we wanted to visit my family in the North at the beginning of the summer and see my wife’s family in the South at the end of the summer.
Everything else in between was pretty up in the air. The first place we stayed — and my favorite — was an Airbnb rental at a ski resort in Colorado. It was summer when we arrived, and we booked a full month’s stay — which gave us an amazing 50% discount — so we didn’t break the bank staying there.
We’re not rich, so we planned to find good deals to stay in that wouldn’t negatively impact our personal finances. Sometimes that meant booking an Airbnb for a longer period so we could receive a discount. And while that worked out well, it still took a lot of planning to get right.
That made booking our stays somewhat stressful, especially when trying to find good deals and when some locations have minimum requirements for how long you have to stay.
What I’d do differently the next time
I feel fortunate to have taken that trip, and at the time, I really wanted to do it the way we did, but I wouldn’t do it the same way again.
Instead of driving across many states, I’d visit a few places near one central location and keep the trip to just one month.
I remember talking to my father-in-law about our trip when we were winding things down, and he said that his dad traveled extensively in retirement before realizing he didn’t want to keep moving around so much. Instead, he split his time between living in a small southern town and on a canal boat in France. Now there’s an idea.
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