Road Trip! BC to California

profdant139 wrote:
The other issue is the cost -- if you tally up the cost of gas and the wear and tear on the rig, it is not cheap to drive from BC to OC, especially if you divide the total by the number of "fun days." (Wear and tear is pretty simple -- if your rig has an expected useful life of 100,000 miles, and the round trip is 5,000 miles, that's 5 percent of the life of the rig and its purchase price.)

In other words, let's say it costs a total of $4000 to drive there and back, and you only have four days of fun out of the 12 total days. That's a thousand dollars a fun day.

By contrast, if you fly and stay in hotels, you lose two days and end up with ten fun days. Even if the total is $5000, that is only $500 per fun day, a much better ratio.

Of course, I have cherry picked these numbers for ease of calculation. The real numbers might be very different!! ;)

I don't think I've ever seen anyone analyze an RV trip this way. How do you assign a dollar value to the experience of the trip?

My wife and I just returned from a 19 state trip, nearly 11,000 miles. We really could have saved a bundle if we'd just flown there and back.