The 3-week road trip we took from Kansas to Alaska was part of our move to our new duty station in Anchorage. As much as a long road trip looked daunting, it turned out to be one of the best trips we’ve ever been on, and that says a lot considering all of the trips we’ve taken. As we shared our adventures, we got many questions on the planning. This blog post will cover how to plan a road trip! If you missed our last post and want to see the exact itinerary we followed, you can check that out here.
According to the Army, it should take 10 days to drive from Fort Leavenworth, KS to Anchorage, AK, and they do provide a stipend for those 10 days. For the family, it was about $300 a day, and that includes hotel, food, etc. While the stipend helps, a lunch at a diner in the middle of no where costs our family almost $100, and the price of even a cheap hotel is not that cheap. So while it definitely offsets costs for the 10 days, we were using points so that we could make this more of an enjoyable vacation.
We knew there was no way we were doing that drive in 10 days if we wanted to stay sane, see the sights, and take it at the speed we like to travel. This blog post will share how I planned our hotels and driving route. I was determined to save money on this trip by using points from credit cards for travel, so a lot of my planning was based on this. Let’s get into it.
How to plan a road trip… where do you start?
Step 1: Flexible and Open Mindset. When planning anything related to the military, we have to be flexible. If you’re not associated with the military, still need to remember to be flexible because stuff happens all the time throwing a wrench in your plans!
Step 2: Points Research: Months before I actually started booking hotels, I looked into what hotel chain was most prevalent along our route. There was a lot of variety to choose from, especially the first 8 days while we were still in the United States, so I went with a few cards where the points could be transferred to a variety of travel partners (Hilton, IGH, Marriott, etc). I got a Chase Sapphire Preferred, then referred Pat to open one, and then did an American Express Gold Card.
Within about 5 months we quickly acquired over 200,000 easily transferrable points.
Then, I found that Marriott was going to be in a lot of the destinations we were going, including my bucket-list destination, Banff. Hotels are insanely expensive in the summer, and I knew I we would need some serious Marriott points if we wanted some nicer stays along our way. In my research over the last year on card points, I know that Marriott points tend to be more expensive, and not always as great of a deal as other hotel rewards, but, it’s all I had to work with in many spots, so, I opened a co-branded Amex Marriott Convoy Brilliant Card. This card’s bonus was if you spend $6,000 in 6 months you get 185,000 Marriott points. We quickly spent $6,000 when we bought our car (they won’t always allow you to put a down payment with a credit card), otherwise we would have used that spend on other day-to-day purchases.
In places throughout Canada where there was basically nothing, I used google maps and looked for highly reviewed cabins and rv parks with lodging. Camping was an option for us, but after we found enough hotels, motels, cabins, we decided not to pack our tents. In google maps, you can use a “search along route” feature, that I would use to search for hotels and attractions.
Step 3: Drive Time. According to the Army, it should take 10 days to make the drive. They don’t teach you how to plan a road trip, but they happily will send us on our way. They did pay a certain amount for gas, our car was weighed and we get reimbursed a certain amount based on how much we are moving ourselves (vs the moving company moving our personal items). We knew that we would max out at around 4 hours of driving per day, and tried to keep it under that. The most we drove was 7 hours in one day.
Doing so gave us the freedom to sleep in, workout in the morning, swim in the hotel pool, and do an activity in the morning or evening after our driving.
Facebook groups such as Driving the Alcan were extremely helpful in helping us decide where to stop. Other members posted their itineraries, reviews of hotels, great places to stop, and more.
Step 4: Booking. As far as scheduling out our stays, we had to wait for our official orders to know for sure when we needed to be in Alaska by, and at that point a lot of stuff was already booked and sold out (specifically in the National Parks). Once I had a date, even a tentative date, that I knew would be safe to book by, I looked at one stop that was on MY bucket list to make all plans around.
That stop was Banff. Banff is a pretty expensive destination, and hotels in the summer are not cheap ($400-$600 a night was the cheapest I found). I was eyeing a hotel that I could use my points around so we could afford to stay there two nights. With my Marriott Bonvoy points there was a hotel in a great location, but you could only use the points on certain days to stay there. So, we picked the room and the days that I could use with points, and booked the rest of the trip based on that.
After booking Banff, I then booked all of the stays through Canada and into Alaska, knowing it was more remote, we had less options to choose from, and there were already limited options to choose from.
Once we knew when the movers were coming in Kansas to get our stuff, I booked from Kansas to Banff accommodations.
I used google maps to find hotel chains (Hyatt, Marriott, IHG, Hilton) along the way and if points could be used there. Then I’d follow the process of transferring points to the hotel and booking through the hotel directly. Everything we booked had at least a 24 hour cancellation policy, just incase we needed to use it.
After the hotels, how to plan a road trip kids will actually enjoy:
The next step is the fun stuff. Once you know where you are staying and how you will get there, what fun stops will you make along the way? Read about that in our next blog post, how to plan road trip stops & activities.