The second part of our four part American holiday – Part 1 being Los Angeles with Disneyland and Universal Studios, Part 3 being Las Vegas and Part 4 being New York City – is our much anticipated road trip, an icon of Americana, the drive from LA to Vegas via Route 66.
Although it’s a relatively short day trip of just four hours if you were to stay on Interstate 15, there are quite a few things to see along the way when you start researching it. For those who don’t know, four hours on the road in Australia doesn’t get you very far but thankfully they are such beautiful drives. So to help you nut out your perfect day trip, here’s how we ended up spending, what ended up being close to seven hours on the road.
There were a few main things that we wanted to check off the bucket list for this, as well as appease a 10 year (although he is such a great traveller), and they were…
- Doing the road trip in a massive pickup truck – hubby’s bucket list item, mine was a convertible.
- Drive on Route 66
- See the desert and Joshua trees
Tick, tick and tick! But, as with anything, it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. Firstly, looking into hiring a ute for the trip took quite a while, not only actually finding one but putting our faith in the hire company to have our dream car there on the day (there are lots of complaints in regards to this one particular subject, lots!). When dealing with car hire companies you are going to come across loads of bad reviews, but after juggling the pros and cons I finally decided to put my trust in Dollar Rent A Car at LAX Airport … well, they were the only car hire company, near enough to Anaheim to have a pickup truck available to cross state lines on the date we wanted it so I had no choice but to book with them and take my chances.
Even though I had booked the pickup a couple of weeks in advance, I wasn’t going to believe I was going to get it till I was actually standing at the counter of Dollar Rent A Car with the keys in my hand. We didn’t care if it was a bomb of a ute or a latest model, just so long as it was a pickup truck. But, like a miracle from the Road Trip Gods they had one, and not just one but two, which worked out really well as the first one we got into had the oil light turn on as soon as we got in, so we just hopped into the other one.
Our gorgeous ute for the LA to Vegas road trip
We had our American pickup truck for the LA to Vegas road trip, a 2015 Chevy Silverado. We were so happy!
We hit the road about 9:30 Wednesday morning with the itinerary mapped out…