Saving Money on Driving Vacations -Top Ten Tips for the Road Warrior

Here are my top ten tips to save you money, time and aggravation on your driving vacation.

1. If your car needs to be repaired before you go, visit repairpal to get a free, realistic quote based upon surveys of auto repair costs at thousands of shops across the country. This site provides quotes based upon your zip code, make, and model of your car. You may also choose to register for a free online account and store your cars’ repair records and then receive email reminders for maintenance, safety alerts, and recalls.

2. Nine states have recently passed laws prohibiting cell phone use while driving. Visit www.drivinglaws.org  for up-to-date information. If you need a “hands free” head set, you can get one at www.FreeHeadset.org. This site promotes safer driving by distributing headsets for hundreds of cell phones. They only charge is $3.94 for shipping anywhere in the country. The company has been written about in the New York Times, Popular Science Magazine and featured on CBS News. Select the make and model of your phone on their website and choose between two types of headsets. For $3.94, buy one for you and one for someone you love.

3. Plan some breaks by stopping at a Cracker Barrel Restaurant. They have 542 locations in 41 states, usually located right off the nearest highway exit. They are known for their comfort food, clean restrooms and gift shops on steroids. They also have a unique audio book purchase and return program for over 200 titles of audio books. You purchase the audio book (at full price) and then have the option to return it to any location for full credit minus a $3.49 charge for each week that you keep the audio book. Make sure to hang on to your receipt.

4. Before you leave, download audio books, eBooks, music and videos for free from a public library.  This is done online at a site is called overdrive.com . You can “check out” 10 titles at a time with no late fees. Once you are on the site, select “Partners”, then “Libraries”, and then “Search Libraries”. There is an excellent tutorial to get you started.

5. Crank up the tunes to drown out the whining by downloading free music from amazon.com.  Type in “free mp3 downloads” in the search bar. You can listen to 30- second samples of the songs before you decide to download them to any digital media player including an iPod. You can also sign up for Amazon’s free newsletter to get a “heads- up” on future freebies.

6. Pack your cooler full of drinks and snacks and then locate the best small-town restaurants along the way at roadfood.com. Also pack baby wipes, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and paper towels. You can locate clean restrooms along your route by visiting thebathroomdiaries.com. Find the lowest price gas along the way at fueleconomy.gov or at gasbuddy.com.

7. Consider buying an Entertainment Book . The 2010  books are discounted and come with free shipping. The coupons are good until November 1, 2009. The book is packed with coupons for national and local retailers, fast food and family-style restaurants, local attractions, movie theaters, grocery stores, rental cars, hotels and much more. Preview it online to see if they offer one for the area that you will be traveling to. The book makes it easier (and cheaper) to negotiate an unfamiliar city. there are plenty of national retailers in the Entertainment Book so you can still save money when you get home.

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