Travel Q&A: Bargain tips for summer driving trips.(South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

Byline: Jean Allen

Q. As soon as school is out, our family plans to take off on a long driving trip, visiting relatives but mostly just seeing the country. We do this almost every year, and decided that high gas prices won't stop us. We do wonder if there will be fewer cars on the road this summer and we could use any bargain tips you may have. We are mother, father and two boys. _ N.A., Huntsville, La.

A. Sounds like you travel the way I do. I was on the road for four weeks, including time for family visits, from mid-March to mid-April, so I have a pretty good read on what's going on this year.

Expect plenty of company out on the highways. I was amazed at how many vacationers were traveling in March. There were herds of motor homes trailering little cars, lots of campers hauled by pickup trucks, often also trailering cars or a rack of bikes, and swarms of SUVs and minivans. Add flotillas of big truck rigs to the mix, and it's no wonder we folks in regular-size cars feel squeezed out.

So I wasn't surprised when the AAA in early May predicted a record number of trips by car will be taken by Americans this summer. I think people waited and waited for gas prices to come down, then decided they might as well take the trip before prices rise even more. So far, that's about what's happening.

On this early trip we stayed in the South, driving from Fort Lauderdale to the Palm Springs area of Southern California, avoiding the nasty weather of late winter to the north. We drove some on Interstates _ 10, 20 and 40 _ and used off-pike roads quite a bit to avoid the big rigs and RVs that crowded the interstates. We'd look at the map, decide we'd like to see Shreveport or Sweetwater, and lay out a route. Sometimes we knew exactly where we wanted to go, and sometimes we winged it. Either way was interesting. We stopped at big factory-outlet malls. We drove into the huge Navajo Reservation in Arizona to see the spectacular Canyon de Chelly. On another trip, we stopped to see the transplanted London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Az.

On the day we left Fort Lauderdale, we filled up the gas tank for $1.96.9 a gallon; it was $1.95.9 when we got home four weeks later; the price at the same station this week was $2.11.9. Let me specify that my station wagon uses super unleaded, which runs about 20 cents a gallon more than regular unleaded. The cheapest gas was in Texas, $1.69.9, and Alabama, $1.75.9. Most expensive was California, $2.45.9 a gallon. We got 30 to 32 miles per gallon out on the road, not bad.