Summer 2013 Road Trips

Being in the travel business, we follow all the ‘trends’ and blogs and such and, supposedly, this summer road travel is way up. According to several travel sites, people are looking to get behind the wheels of their cars and hit the road and with gasoline prices relatively down and airline ticket prices up, this sounds like a great idea. Within the industry, these types of trips are referred to as ‘one tank trips’ meaning that it takes a single tank of gasoline to get to and from your destination and enjoy yourself while you’re there.

Peggy and I love doing road trips to discover all sorts of cool things within a days’ drive from home and are also appreciative when we happen across a local “find.” That’s why we’ve put a lot of hours into this new website here which has all sorts of great suggestions for activities to enjoy while you’re visiting us. Of course we’re always happy to share all the happenings and happening spots while you’re here.

Here are a few highlights - there’s much more going on and you can always look at our event calendar for all the latest and greatest items going on in the area. 

• All summer long there are great free concerts on Friday nights in Library Park in Lakeport. With a nice variety of bands and a good variety of food choices this is a fun afternoon in the park. For more live music the Blue Wing Saloon has live music on Mondays as well. 
  
  
• There are some great places to go hiking in the area from a simple walk in the park to a hike up Konocti. Our new site has both a listing of all the parks in Lake County and a whole page detailing activities in the great outdoors. 
  
  
• We all love to eat and we’ve compiled a page of restaurants in the area. There’s everything from a great little Thai experience to a Mexican restaurant that serves food overlooking the Lake and a number of choices that will be happy to serve you what might have been on grandma’s table back in the old days. 
  
  
• Leave the driving to someone else - we’ve got a great company that does fun limousine wine tours in the area with knowledgeable drivers who treat you like royalty. 
  
  

According to some of these experts who spend too much time looking at this stuff, the cost of driving your newer car is something like 62¢ per mile. This accounts for fuel, insurance, and depreciation plus all the other related expenses of driving a car. With that cost in mind, it runs around $160 for the round trip from the Featherbed Railroad to San Francisco. But here’s a cool alternative. 

You can rent a car which means all the depreciation, maintenance and wear costs are transferred to the rental agency. Plus how cool is it to rent something you might have been lusting over, like a nice convertible or sports car? You can leave ol’ Betsy in the garage and drive the rental agency’s spiffy wheels for a few days adding another dimension of coolness to your vacation. 

We actually have an agreement with Enterprise Rent-A-Car where you can get special pricing when using our coupon code. This means you’ll save a few bucks and possibly score on a great car that you’ve been lusting after. This is another thing Peggy and I do - we find some nifty ride and then get a great deal on renting it. 

Our local rental office had access to some neat rides including fancy luxury cars and convertibles but we could also rent cars that got great gas mileage, which is a nice alternative for us from the 15 mile per gallon truck that we own. And we can only bring so much baling wire and duct tape so the Corvairs don’t make long journeys. 

There is also a great post on the Curbside Automotive Blog about tips for saving gasoline. 

We hope the Featherbed Railroad is on your list of favorite road trips for this summer and we’re always here to help you plan a getaway. Give us a call or head over to our Facebook page and give us a shout. Either way, we hope to see you this summer.