Or can anyone share road trip tips on budgets or anything along these lines?
We drove 25,000 km on our last road trip. We took 6 weeks to cross the US Southwest and boondocked on BLMs in the most beautiful and secluded places on earth (think Grand Canyon but free, and without anyone around for miles and miles of wilderness), with a cheap hotel stay every 7-10 days to stock up on provisions, wash up a bit, and recharge our batteries, literally and figuratively. We have no fridge or running water, just a simple useless cooler and a 5-gallon water jug for drinking, cooking and a daily "sponge-bath". Free refills at most gas-stations. We cooked on a little camping stove most of the time, with the occasional sit-down meal for a special occasion (wife's birthday, anniversary). Overall, with careful planning, we spent less on food than what we would have spent at home.
After the US Southwest, we then crossed into Mexico where we spent the rest of the winter, boondocking on desert beaches, mountain roads, sierras, secluded river banks, and little pueblos. In December, we rented a nice little basic apartment near the beach in a non-touristy village near Puerto Vallarta ($600 CDN per month all inclusive) so my wife and the cat could stay put while I traveled back to Canada for a couple of weeks in December. In Mexico, we crisscrossed the states of Durango, Sonora, Colima, Michoacan, Jalisco, Nayarit, San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, Chihuahua a, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon. Next fall, winter and spring, we are going back to explore Pueblo, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Campeche, Tabasco, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, and Guatemala and Belize. We are skipping Veracruz and Guerrero due to uncertainty about safety in those two states. Camping most of the time.