Road Trip Mistake #10: Trying To Balance Time & Money… And Failing

One of the biggest challenges of our 50 state road trip is booking accommodation in optimal locations at a low cost.

In an ideal world, we’d like to stay somewhere central when visiting cities. Needless to say though, the closer you stay to the center of a city, the more expensive it is.

It’s sometimes been possible to mitigate this by booking an Airbnb – something we did to stay in a great location in Savannah, GA last year. Other times we’ve put free night certificates from credit card renewals to good use, such as our stays at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio and the Kimpton Gray in Chicago last year.

This isn’t always possible though as Airbnbs can still be too expensive and we only have so many free night certificates each year. In those instances we have to compromise by staying a little further out of a city. That can work out fine when a city isn’t too large and they don’t have a bad traffic problem. For example, our very first stop on our road trip was Columbia, SC. We stayed 10 miles outside of downtown Columbia, but it only took ~15 minutes to get there which wasn’t bad at all.

That doesn’t always work though which leads us to our latest road trip mistake.

Shae and I recently spent 12 days in Washington D.C. The capital is a great place for finding free things to do thanks to all the monuments, memorials and free museums. Accommodation on the other hand is much more expensive.

In case you’ve never checked out our monthly stats series, we’re trying to do our road trip on a budget of $100 per day. That has to include accommodation, hotel pet fees, food, gas, activities, phone bills, etc., so paying $150+ per night for a hotel for 12 days simply wasn’t an option.

I therefore had to look further afield and found a seemingly great option. There was a Hyatt Place in Chantilly out by Dulles Airport. It was a category 1 property which meant it only cost 5,000 points per night, but they also had some great paid rates thanks to a special offer they had at the time where you’d get the fourth night free when paying for the first three nights. It can get tedious moving around all the time on the road trip, so I booked us a total of 12 nights there – some paid and some using points.

That’s where the mistake came in.

Our hotel was about 25 miles from Washington D.C. which, in theory, wasn’t terrible. What was terrible was the traffic. I mean, I knew it would be bad, but it was even worse than expected. A journey that would take ~30-35 minutes with no traffic routinely took 75-90 minutes due to roadworks and general traffic.

It didn’t impact us too badly at the start of our time there as we’d taken Truffles with us into the city. We decided to wander around seeing all the monuments and memorials for our first few days, so that was pet-friendly seeing as it was all outdoors.

Taking care of Truffles caused problems later in the trip though when we wanted to visit museums and other indoor activities. Seeing as she wasn’t allowed in any of those, we had to leave her behind at the hotel in her crate. Having a ~3 hour round trip therefore limited how much time we were able to spend in the city doing those activities as we didn’t want to leave her in there for too long, so we didn’t end up seeing anywhere near as much stuff as we wanted.

Lesson Learned

In hindsight, I wish I’d done things differently with our hotel booking. A better option would’ve been to book eight nights at the Hyatt Place in Chantilly, then four nights in downtown Washington D.C. using some of our free night certificates. We could’ve done pet-friendly activities during the first eight days, then indoor activities during the subsequent four days.

For example, if we’d been staying downtown we could’ve visited a museum or two in the morning, taken Truffles for a walk at lunch, then seen another museum or two in the afternoon.

Seeing as we missed out on quite a few museums during this trip, we’re considering spending another few days in Washington D.C. in the future, perhaps just before or just after whenever we visit Maryland. It’s just a shame it took this mistake to work out a better way to book our accommodation there, but I’ll hopefully remember to bear this in mind with future hotel bookings.