Rock n Roll Road Trips - Florida or California?

Hello!

My name is Cody Rohn. Me and some of my friends have had some ideas for a road trip for awhile now. I'm actually in a band with some of my best friends, we started it during my Senior year in high school, which was about a year and a half ago. We've played at a few shows around where I live, we've actually made some money too. There's actually four of us total, Me, Cassidy, Luke and John. Our dream is to go on tour across America. We are located in Southeastern Michigan in a small town. One night me and Luke were talking about ideas with a band, we actually a Christian Band, so playing at churches would be a great too.

Right now I have two main ideas.

# 1. Road trip down to Florida. It'll be a about a 18-20 hour drive for us, depends how far we go down in Florida. Our goal is to stop in every state and play for someone. This could be at a bar, a church, anywhere, anyone who could pay us some money. We'll come down with plenty of money, but I bet the show money would help pay for food/gas/motels. We could drive all day, then play the next day, or that night.

This was my first idea, here is number two.
#2. Road trip out west! California!!!

I did some direction work on mapquest, this will be a about 36 hours total for us. This trip will be a bit more pricey, but I'm sure its worth it. This trip would be amazing journey for us, our first stop will be in the Chicago area, and our last stop will be on the coast of California.

I'm sure the drive will be amazing, driving through the Mountains of Colorado and Utah, and the cornfields of Nebraska!

Just like my first idea, we'll stop in every city state. Maybe even multiple cities, especially once we get into California.

This was my idea. This is our dream for our band, how well do you think this would work out? Our band is a mixture of Christian rock, and soft rock. I play the drums when we do more harder rock, and I play my Cajon when we go more acoustic. Hopefully we'll find bars that'll let us play!

This trip will probably go over 1-2 weeks. I'm not sure how soon we will do this too. It might be around 2012, I'm only going for a associates degree, so I should be graduating around then. I was thinking we could do this around June/ July time.

Hope to hear back from you! It'll be great hearing from a travel expert! Thanks for everything!

Cody

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Dear Cody --

Many thanks for your nice note, and I hope you and your band do manage to take one or both of your proposed trips. Good luck!

My one real advice would be to take care so you don't get too tired -- driving long distances can be very tiring, and staying up late playing music is no substitute for a good night's sleep. Quite the opposite, in fact. So it will be very important that you give yourselves plenty of time to do the drives, scope out towns and clubs and churches etc. Don't rush.

The other key to making these trips work will be finding a road-trip vehicle that is both reliable, and spacious enough to carry your gear and let some of you sleep while others do the driving.

The good thing is you have plenty of time -- hope it all works out!

Happy trails,


Jamie Jensen
--
Road Trip USA