Help plan my belated honeymoon to the US! (OP updated 11/08/19 FINAL VERSION!)

Soldato
Joined
4 May 2007
Posts
9,347
Location
West Midlands
Amen to this

My combined wedding/honeymoon in over nearly 3 weeks in: NY/Vegas/San Diego/Santa Monica/Santa Barbara/San Francisco ended up costing about £15,000 inc flights, car hire and accomodation.

It was ridiculous - Approx 20% more thanks to the pound dropping after the Brexit vote.

Wow that's expensive! I did 17 days in May just west coast (between San fran/san diego) for around £5k altho was fairly savvy!

Id recommend OP reads the below thread. How long are you going for and what's the budget? I'd highly recommend san diego, Pacific Coast highway, San fran. Even LA I found there was a lot to go see.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/road-tripping-in-the-usa.18227057/
 
Associate
Joined
21 Jul 2016
Posts
972
Location
Texas
You need to give us some idea of what you like/want to do. Cities? Nature? Combo?

The American west is stunning, especially if you've only seen it on TV. Grand Canyon, Yosemite, "Utah canyons"*, Redwood forrest, Pacific coast highway... etc. From Vegas you're within a days drive of GC, Utah canyons and Yosemite... though Yosemite is in the opposite direction from the other two :shrug:

* Utah, which borders Nevada, has some of the most stunning canyons in the world. Zion and Bryce come to mind. These are breathtaking. They will require hiking to see them and it's very hot in August so keep that in mind.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
Thanks for all the responses so far! I've just updated the OP to very quickly jot down the absolute barebones of the route overall (without any of my notes so far on what we were planning to do)... and added a quick sentence at the end to point out what sort of thing we like to do (TL;DR nature stuff :p)
 
Associate
Joined
2 Oct 2007
Posts
1,430
Location
Winchester
if you go to santa monica i high recommend hiring the lime/bird electric scooters. it allows you to see a lot more and they are a lot of fun. also best breakfast i had in the us was from a place called egg **** (slur) was awesome!
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
OP Updated once again to add a bit of detail of some of the main things we wanted to do at a few of the main locations...

And to make this post worthwhile, a couple of logistical questions:

Trying to work out what to do about phones and music while we are there... From my research it seems like a bit of a minefield - whatever route you try to look up in terms of taking a UK SIM over there you eventually find people complaining about speeds, throttling, borderline un-usable service... but I'm unsure how current some of those comments are and whether things have improved since. I know it's possible to buy a US SIM but I don't really want the hassle of having to go and do that once we get there. So it seems like the two most obvious options would be:
  • Just use the phones we have (both have SIM only O2 contracts), for £4.99 a day we can get 120 texts + minutes plus unlimited data - a bit pricey at ~£100 each for the trip but the most straightforward thing to do
  • Order a couple of PAYG Three SIMs, unlock our phones if needed, and then pay for a month's worth that will cover us there. It's cheaper with various different data caps up to unlimited at £35. This is what I'm leaning towards tbh
As for music, it depends a bit what connections the car will have (if we do get a Nissan Maxima it looks like the recent ones have just about every connection you could hope for) but I'm thinking if we have unlimited data on at least one phone then we can hopefully use Spotify and either Bluetooth to the car, with an AUX jack as a backup. I've also got an iPod classic but it's on its last legs so wouldn't want to rely on it. Possible the car will also accept a USB drive with music on it, so I could try to do that as a backup. It seems a bit of a silly thing to fret over but with so many long drives and good scenery I think having our choice of good music will really enhance the trip - I know we can listen to the radio but I bet it's just like the UK radio (too much repetition, too many annoying adverts, etc)

Edit: Just realised I didn't acknowledge many of the helpful posts above:

I appreciate all the tips - sadly anything to do with changing the route is off the table at this point (the hotels etc. are already booked) even though I agree Bryce Canyon etc. look absolutely fantastic and I'd love to see them someday (I think Mrs.Rufus is also really keen to go to Houston to see the space museum and stuff so perhaps that would be a plan in the future)

Equally the immigration time-saver in Ireland sounds really neat, but we're already booked on the flights and can't change them. We're flying into McCarran though not LAX so fingers crossed it won't be quite as terrible
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Nov 2003
Posts
5,615
Location
Scotland
I used a Three PAYG SIM and had zero issues with speeds (except for obvious places like Yosemite/Death Valley). £20 will get you 12GB of data which should be plenty. My wife made us a bunch of playlists for the trip and we downloaded the music we needed each night when we were at our hotels, which all had decent wifi.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
I used a Three PAYG SIM and had zero issues with speeds (except for obvious places like Yosemite/Death Valley). £20 will get you 12GB of data which should be plenty. My wife made us a bunch of playlists for the trip and we downloaded the music we needed each night when we were at our hotels, which all had decent wifi.

Yeah I thought that might be a good option - presumably if you use wifi to download a playlist whilst at your hotel then you don't technically need the mobile data allowance to play it (or is that not how it works?)... The only potential issue there is that my phone doesn't have that much storage space on it and has even less free; but I can probably dump all of my photos and free up as much space as possible before we go, then shuffle playlists on and off it inbetween journeys to keep it fresh
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Jun 2004
Posts
19,437
Location
On the Amiga500
I'd load an mp3 player/sd card with music and I'd sack off all comms for the entire honeymoon, just having my UK phone to hand for emergencies. In Vegas, most of the hotels are free WiFi too. You'll get WiFi pretty much the entire length of the strip.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
I'd load an mp3 player/sd card with music and I'd sack off all comms for the entire honeymoon, just having my UK phone to hand for emergencies. In Vegas, most of the hotels are free WiFi too. You'll get WiFi pretty much the entire length of the strip.

Hmm, I've thought about it all some more and come to the following conclusions:
  • You're right - we don't really need comms, most of the time if we were to message family or look things up it would likely be in the evenings with the benefit of hotel wifi
  • I just had a muck about with my phone and realised since I have Spotify premium I can easily set a bunch of albums/playlists to "download" (as FishFluff mentioned above) and they will then work offline... I have about 16GB free and based on some testing the music downloaded seems to take up surprisingly little space - so this will be totally fine, with the added benefit that we won't be relying on the data connection which may be patchy out in the sticks
After that the only real possible concern would be an emergency situation (we break down or something)... so I think we'll just setup the O2 travel bolton - it's £4.99 a day but only if you actually use calls/texts/data so we can just disable data + cell on the phones and activate it only if we absolutely need to. We don't need them for GPS as the car has it built in
 
Soldato
Joined
30 Sep 2008
Posts
6,769
Nothing helpful to add, however this seems very similar to a trip I'm planning with the Mrs next year so I'll be following this with interest.

I'm not sure if you have already, but there is a US Road Trip thread in Motors with a lot of guys who have done California jaunts.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
Nothing helpful to add, however this seems very similar to a trip I'm planning with the Mrs next year so I'll be following this with interest.

I'm not sure if you have already, but there is a US Road Trip thread in Motors with a lot of guys who have done California jaunts.

No problem :) I can update once we've actually been on the trip to say how the various bits of advice and planning worked out in the end

Yes I've commented in the other thread a few times (mostly a couple of years ago when we were very first planning the route etc. - before it all got delayed by a year)... I could have had this discussion in that thread but I selfishly thought that I'd rather have my own where I don't have to wade through so much other unrelated discussion
 

A2Z

A2Z

Soldato
Joined
9 May 2005
Posts
8,922
Location
Earth
Whatever budget you plan for Vegas - double it. Went last year spent about £1.5k in 4/5 days just on spending money.. ridiculous prices.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
Whatever budget you plan for Vegas - double it. Went last year spent about £1.5k in 4/5 days just on spending money.. ridiculous prices.

What qualifies as spending money? I could easily see us spending that much once you factor in the cost of things like the helicopter trip (which I think works out about $500 each or something crazy like that) but all of that stuff is already paid for so I think the other costs (for us that's mostly just food, and not that much of it tbh) won't be too bad (but perhaps I'm naive and will get a shock!)
 
Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2010
Posts
4,168
In Vegas I would definitely recommend La Reve at the Wynn and also Mystere (Cirque show) at Treasure Island, had Absinthe recommended to me so when we go back in Feb we shall be trying that.

The buffet at the Wynn is amazing and certainly looks a lot better than Treasure Island one (from just walking past) although the cost is probably reflective of that and don't get suckered into one of the (seems like this many) dozen or so Gordon Ramsey restaurants that have popped up in the last couple of years as to me they all looked really over-priced, Hash Haus Ago-go is epic for huge breakfasts in the Lynq (was featured on a Man v Food episode a while ago) which is attached to the High Roller.

There is a tram that goes up most of the Strip (it's just back and goes from Treasure Island to Mirage and then the Bellagio to Aria/T-Mobile arena) and is free.

The SlotZilla ride (zipline) down Fremont Street is great but for the length of the ride seems a little expensive, we like the Fashion Show Mall and shopping at the Forum (Caesar's Palace), if you want an outlet shopping experience go to the North Mall which is on the way from the Strip to Fremont Street.

In San Fran I would say Fisherman's Wharf is great and there's more than enough places to eat down there, as you have already got a cycle ride over the Golden Gate and Alcatraz booked I'd look a visit to Sausalito and also Muir Woods, Lombard Street (the curvy block part as Lombard Street actually goes about the length of San Fran) is also something worth seeing (just to actually see the weird way it's located) and is only a couple of blocks from Fisherman's Wharf (although it's on a pretty steep climb).

There's more but that's all I can think of at the moment as I'm at work.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
14 Mar 2011
Posts
5,418
Just seen you've added some destinations!

Try and stop by Seligman in Arizona whilst you are travelling from Vegas to Yosemite. Just Google it and you'll see why

I gave it a Google and whilst it looks cool it seems to be in the opposite direction to where we're going? (We'll be in Furnace Creek the day after Vegas and then heading out to Yosemite)
 
Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
159,534
He's not driving to the Canyon he's flying.

On that note, careful - make sure your tour actually goes to the proper Grand Canyon. Many of them do not especially with helicopters. We took a fixed wing flight to the South Rim, which is where you want to go.
 
Associate
Joined
21 Nov 2007
Posts
1,064
Location
Fleet, Hampshire
Days 6 & 7 - stay in Yosemite. Heaven on earth. I note you are staying in Fish Camp. I would highly (highly!) recommend spending some time in the main Valley. We went in August and it is busy but never overbearingly so. As mentioned elsewhere Zion is awesome but probably doesn't fit the itinerary unless you shorten the actual coast leg.
 
Back
Top Bottom