Vehicles Booked!

The trip is turning from a dream to a reality - we have now booked both the Harley (H-C Travel) and the Ford Mustang (Rentalcars.com)!!!  Very exciting!  We have also booked a lot of the hotel accommodation too.  I was checking on potential hotels in Chicago (our start point) and discovered that a number of the good value hotels that I had previously shortlisted were full - already!  So, in order to be sure of reserving the hotels in the locations we wanted, I decided to make a start on bookings.  Critical places are those with either limited hotels or in particularly popular locations, for example: Monument Valley, Grand Canyon Village, Santa Fe, Santa Monica and Santa Barbara.
The great thing about sites like Booking.com is that you can make the bookings but you are not required to pay until arrival - and the booking can be cancelled up to 24 hours beforehand.
The trouble is that once you start you don't want to stop!  Frustratingly, it seems you can only book about 11 months in advance, so I am stuck at the moment until the end of September 2014 - I can't do any October bookings yet.
Similarly with flights, you can only book up to 50 weeks in advance and, because our return flight is at the end of  October 2014, we can't book that yet.  Not long now though!
By the way - I came across a great App/ website the other day.  Its called Trip It and it's brilliant for organizing a trip itinerary.  You just forward your booking confirmation emails to your account on the site and it pulls off all the relevant info (booking confirmation reference, times, dates, etc) and creates an itinerary with all the info you need in one place.  It can all be downloaded on to the mobile app so you can have all the info on your phone and you don't have to carry round reams of paper print outs.  Brilliant!

Rent or Buy?

One of the first things we considered was whether to rent a Harley, ship our own over to the USA or even buy one over there and then sell again at the end of the trip.  We decided fairly early on that buying and selling would be a lot of hassle and very time consuming - it's also not an easy thing to do from a long distance.  We looked in to shipping costs but again, this would be time consuming, probably very costly and a lot of hassle.  Plus, unless shipping by air, it's a lengthy process - especially shipping to mid-USA or the West Coast.  It would be great to actually do the trip on our own bike, but the hassle, liklihood of damage, the uncertainty of arrival/departure dates, customs issues, etc, etc just made it unviable.  So - renting turned out to be the only realistic option, however, renting a Harley is not cheap, certainly compared to renting a car, especially when doing a one-way rental.

When we decided that we were only going to do Route 66 on the Harley and then continue the second half on 4 wheels, we considered renting a camper van or RV.  This would give us the option of stopping wherever and whenever we want without being tied to planning a particular overnight stop in advance.  I made numerous enquiries regarding RV rentals but they all turned out to be relatively expensive, especially considering the low mpg that most, if not all, of the vehicles seem to be capable of (10-15 mpg seemed about the best!).  The extra fuel costs, plus the fact that many RV sites charge in excess of $50 per night to my mind outweighs the advantages of the flexibility of an RV.  As it is perfectly possible to get reasonable standard hotel accommodation quite cheaply, along with the fact that car rental is not only quite cheap but also more fuel efficient (it's all relative - 30 to 40 mpg is good in the USA!!!) a car plus hotels looks like the best option for "Exercise Road Trip - Phase 3".

Those decisions made - the next stage is to actually book the bike and car rental.  One of the problems of planning so far in advance is that it seems it is impossible to book anything more than about 52 weeks in advance.  So far I cannot get any proper quotes for car rentals because the return date is still too far in advance.  I have found one company that I have received a very competitive quote from and, whilst it is far too early to be able to recommend them, they certainly appear to be very competitive (www.rentalcars.com).  I have managed to get a few quotes for Harley rental.  The best quote I got was from a company in San Francisco (www.californiamotorcycleadventures.com) however, when we decided we weren't going to do a round trip a) San Francisco was not a suitable start/finish point for what we wanted to achieve and b) the one-way rental fee was prohibitive ($1000!).  There are a number of companies that rent bikes for the Route 66 Adventure and it is difficult to choose as they all appear to be much of a muchness in terms of cost, etc.  Still much to decide......

Welcome

Welcome to our blog.  I am new to the art of blogging but decided to try writing one mainly to keep a record of the trip that we have been planning for some time now and will be undertaking in just under a year's time.

As background, I am retiring from the Royal Air Force in October next year (2014) and my wife, Jill, and I are intending to move to France and run our successful holiday rentals business full time from there.  We have been running our business, Razay Holiday Cottages for 10 years now.  Check out our website to find out more: www.razay.com .

During the last 20 years as a "Parachute Jump Instructor" or PJI in the RAF I have spent a lot of time in the USA conducting parachute training or, more recently, parachute testing and evaluation.  I had promised Jill that at some stage we would have a holiday over there and at last the time has come! 

This is probably going to be our "Trip of a Lifetime" and is a little reward to ourselves after 26 years in the RAF.  We plan to take nearly 7 weeks in total - the first half to travel Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles on a Harley Davidson Softail Heritage Classic and the second half to travel the Pacific Coast Highway, LA to Seattle, Wa, in a Ford Mustang convertible.

The original plan was to travel a round trip from San Francisco via Seattle, Chicago, Route 66, LA and back to San Francisco all on the Harley.  We decided that this might be too much, so then we reduced this to Chicago to Seattle via Route 66 and the PCH, but even then nearly 7 weeks on a bike was going to be hard work, so we settled for Route 66 on the Harley (the only way to travel Route 66!) and the PCH by car.

So that's a bit of background.  As I said earlier, planning has been going on for some time now but I shall go in to more detail in future posts.  Thanks for reading.