Hey all,
Looking for some good road trip ideas as well as cheap lodging for a family of four out of Southern California. It would be my wife and I and our LOs (currently 21mos and 3mos). I have like 4 weeks of CA EDD (partial pay) left where I can supplement with PTO, so I'm effectively only having to take 4hrs of PTO a day. The 4 remaining weeks expires Feb 2018, but I would like to use at least 2 of the weeks for this year. We're thinking about planning something either September or October. A 2 week road trip might be a little intense with 2 LOs so we might break it out into 1 week road trips.
Off the cuff, there's PCH, Yosemite, San Diego but I'm sure there's much more (even driving out of state - Zion? Grand Canyon? Bryce?). I would of course also want to keep lower-cost lodging in mind for all this but that seems difficult. Camping/Car-camping would probably be rough with two kids that young but we're also not the most 'adventurous' type as a whole (my wife would have a really rough time with this I think). Renting an RV has also come to mind too but I haven't researched it a whole lot and I'm pretty intimidated by the idea of driving something that big and knowing how to operate it, etc...
We took a week during Spring Break (March) to go to Zion and Bryce. We looked at hotels and AirBnB. We ended up in a 3BR, 2BA townhouse in Kanab, UT, for less than a hotel. It was quite nice. It was about an hour from Zion and 2-2.5 hours from Bryce? Totally do-able. Our kids were 9 and 3 when we did that. It was $900 for 5 days in the AirBNB.
Map it out, but we are old and cannot really drive more than 6 hours a day. Because a 6 hour drive by Google is more like 8 or 9 when you add in bathroom and lunch stops. So for our trip from Santa Barbara to Kanab, it's 9 hours driving time (which means actually 11 with stops). We took 2 days to get there. 2 days to drive there, 5 nights there, 2 days to drive back. We REALLY enjoyed this trip. Those parks are gorgeous - Bryce especially, and there was plenty of other stuff to do too. The townhouse we stayed at had a little park with trails right behind it. I loved this trip so much that I'm trying to figure out how to go back and extend it to see Canyonlands, Arches, and Capitol Reef too.
We've been to Yosemite a couple of times, stayed in hotels outside the park (Mariposa?) And once we stayed in a duplex in Yosemite West, which is actually inside the park. It was reasonably priced when we went, which was also spring break.
This spring break we went to June Lake, north of Mammoth. Very pretty and more reasonably priced than Mammoth.
Apparently we travel in Spring break.
We've also gone to San Diego/ Carlsbad/ Legoland.
I've considered renting a van from Escape Campervans. But with little kids I don't think I'd necessarily do it.