Road Trips Don't Have To Be Expensive

Now there’s travel on a budget and there’s travel on a budget. A few years ago I found myself without income or direction after my university’s budget cuts ended my job and my degree program in one fell swoop. My solution was to move across the country, all the way from my hometown in Alaska down to the lower-48, where I transferred into a writing program. Here’s how I conserved my shoe-string budget while still having fun during my summer living out of my van, driving across the continent.

(Note: I don’t do affiliate marketing, I only talk about the services I actually used on my trip.)

1. Be Smart With Your Gas

Over nearly 5,000 miles of driving, my biggest and most important expense that summer was gas. There are a few tricks I learned to manage the expense, first and foremost being to bring a gas can. When gas is cheap near mid-sized towns you fill the gas can up, and when it's expensive you use that gas instead. In some very rural places in northern Canada or the less developed United States, gas can be nearly three times as expensive!

It can also be helpful to download a gas-pricing app. I used GasBuddy on my trip and while it definitely suffers from some problems - slow loading speeds being the most cumbersome - it has helped me avoid filling up at overpriced stations. Google Maps offers a light-weight built-in gas price tracking feature as well, though it doesn’t seem to cover as many stations as dedicated apps.

Don’t be afraid to strike out on foot on occasion! This is helpful especially in big cities where public transit is a viable option. For example, when I got to San Francisco I parked in a free lot a friend showed me, then for the rest of the day I walked or rode the streetcars to get around. If I had spent the day driving not only would I have used more gas, but I would have had to pay for parking!

The most important tactic to minimizing your gas costs is to move slow and plan ahead. Especially with long, one-way road trips like mine, it’s essential to plan out your next moves ahead of time so you don’t end up back-tracking. Make sure you’re done with an area before you move on! Don’t be afraid to stay an extra day - staying longer costs less than turning around and coming back later.

2. Camp on the Cheap

If you’re willing to rough it a little, camping can be wildly inexpensive. During my three-month-long trip, I paid to camp a grand total of four nights, largely thanks to a dedicated community of off-the-grid campers who want to share their best camping spots with you too!

iOverlander.com is a great way to find free, safe, inconspicuous places to camp. There’s a large community of users who post coordinates of camping spots, both established and unofficial, all over the world! Simply type in the area you want to camp and see the campgrounds nearby. Because all of the website's information is crowd-sourced it can be spotty or outdated sometimes, but most of the time it works like a charm.

If you’re in the US, you can always make use of BLM land. Land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is free for anyone to use at any time, always, forever. The one caveat is that you can’t damage the land in any way. This means no fires, no wood harvesting, no littering (which you shouldn’t do anyway) or you could face federal charges. It’s also probably best to sleep in your car, not pitch a tent. Despite the restrictions, camping on BLM land is a major money saver. When I visited Mesa Verde I stayed on BLM land for free, while the national park campsite just 20 minutes up the road charges $36 per night.

If your travels take you through southern Canada or California, camping for free may be even easier. Many cities in both regions have completely free public use campgrounds, no strings attached. Most campsites ask you not to stay for more than three days, but three days of free camping is still a deal hard to turn down! When you’re traveling in these areas, make sure to search “free campsites in (wherever you’ll be staying)” so that you don’t miss any possible publicly funded sites like the superb campsite in Burns Lake, BC, CA.

As a last resort, Walmarts all over the continent will let you stay in the parking lot for free overnight. Particularly if you’re traveling in the height of tourist season, this isn’t as sketchy as it sounds. Parking lots are almost always well-lit and monitored by security cameras. If you decide to do this at the right time of year, you will most likely come across a group of RV campers you can park beside or behind to give you even more of a sense of security. Walmart also frequently asks police or private security firms to patrol their parking lots a few times a night, which can be a positive or a negative thing.

3. Eat What You Can Afford

Speaking of supermarkets, it may be wise to cook your own food on the road. There are lots of easily storable, easy-to-cook foods you can tuck away in your car to save you from having to eat out repeatedly. If you’re on a shorter trip, you could cook and seal your meals ahead of time, either freezing them in a portable cooler and thawing them out along the way of making dry, storable meals that you can whip out any time you’d like.

You can also pick up a propane burner on the cheap at your local camping store and cook meals as you go. I bought a single-burner propane stove for $20 and two propane tanks for an additional $5. If you plan to cook as you go, there are plenty of easy-to-cook foods to choose from. I recommend searching for the free PDF “The Vanlife Cookbook,” which has excellent advice for cooking on the go.

4. Pick Up A Side Hustle

One of the most effective ways to travel on a budget is to turn that travel into income. Whether it be a monetized Instagram page, a travel blog, or anything else you can do on the road, having even the smallest income while traveling is a lifesaver. I was lucky enough to host a takeover of my old college’s Instagram during a few weeks of my travel and even though it didn’t pay much, getting paid at all for traveling is a great asset.

There it is friends! Four ways to keep traveling cheap. I plan to write more about my trip here as a hybrid journal/travel guide, so stay tuned!