If you know me, you know that one of the most important aspects of a long road trip is how you will traverse the road - in other words, what vehicle will you take? We considered a number of options, starting with the most basic - we actually own some cars, so why not use one of those? The problem, of course, is that the closest area of interest to our home is about 1,700 miles away, and the ending point of the tour is about 2,900. Thus adding nine or so days to the trip - more than we want to invest in travel to and from.
So we moved onto the choices of renting a vehicle.
My better half had graciously offered to take me up literally on an oft-stated desire of mine, namely to rent an RV and just drive for a month or more and see what we could see. This, of course, would need to be tempered (in the spirit of making the trip enjoyable for both of us) with frequent stays in
Since the trip will start in Rapid City, SD, to see the Black Hills and Mt. Rushmore, my first research involved pricing the major companies (Hertz, Avis, etc.) for their "one-way" price between Rapid City and our final destination in San Francisco. The prices which came back - about $8,000 for a medium sedan - encouraged me to try two other options: buying a car and then reselling it, or using an off brand rental company.
Joe's Bar & Rentals of Rapid City offered both - I could either rent this fine vehicle, or buy it outright:
He promised to make me a good price, but I wasn't sure.
In thinking it through, I realized the problem was that there really isn't a big market to drive cars back to Rapid City from San Fran, so I priced the rental from Denver and it came out to a much more reasonable price - between $1,600 and $2,100, depending on the rental company and class of car. So we will have an eminently boring large sedan, which will probably be quite comfortable. We also realized that flying to Denver will be easier than Rapid City, but that's another story.
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