Houston - New Orleans - Miami - Tampa

[Freddie328]

Very rough plans at the moment.....

Fly to Houston, get connecting flight to New Orleans, stay in New Orleans for ??? nights, connecting flight to Miami, stay in Miami for ??? nights, fly to Tampa or hire car and drive to Tampa, stay in/around Tampa for ??? nights & fly back to London from Tampa. Have 12 nights in total. Is it worth staying in Houston for a night or do we go straight to New Orleans? Any suggestions for any of these places gratefully received!

[Freddie328]

K50 DEL said:

My first question looking at your itinerary though is "why so much flying?" the US is the king of countries for road trips... hire yourself a car at your first destination and get out there and discover the real America, not just stopovers in major cities!

Agree totally on the road trip bit! My exact reason for this post - to get ideas! Sorry, I realise I only mentioned the hire car bit for the end part from Miami to Tampa, another option though is to drive the whole trip and I have looked into that but I know nothing about that part of the US so would love to know if there are places in that area/on that route that we really should see. Plus we are limited to 12 days.

Our last 4 main holidays have been road trips (Sottish Highlands, California with PN and 2 Alpine trips) and I loved every minute of them but a tiny part of me does quite fancy only having to pack/unpack a couple of times rather than every day!!!

[Freddie328]

K50 DEL said:

Are Houston, New Orleans, Miami and Tampa definate destinations or have you just randomly picked them?
Also, have you already booked your flights, I notice you're planning on flying into one city and out of another, that's normally much more expensive than a standard return though there are ways around it....

We want to use up some of our BA miles and of course as usual reward flights in Club are limited. New Orleans is most definitely on the 'must do' list and we thought rather than do it for a long weekend we would incorporate it into a longer holiday. BA don't fly direct there so the nearest option is Houston. Miami is also somewhere we would like to see but no return reward flights available from there hence Tampa. The dates also fit in with when and how long we can go for. Any where else along the way would be a bonus! Nothing is booked yet, it is just something I came up with yesterday when looking at the reward flight availablity.

[Freddie328]

Thanks, am now thinking that given our time constraints and the availability of reward flights we have 2 options; We could either get a connecting flight from Houston to New Orleans and then pick up a car when we leave New Orleans and drive the rest of it, I would presume given these time constraints we would have to do some motorway but is there a particularly nice bit of coastal route from there and is there anywhere you would recommend staying along the way?.
Or, we could fly from New Orleans to Tampa and just have the car whilst we're in Florida, at least that way we would be returning the car to where it came from!

Edited by Freddie328 on Monday 9th December 13:01

[Freddie328]

surveyor said:

One way rental charges for out of state are fierce. Flying makes more sense.

We priced it up driving from NY to Florida and it worked out £600 cheaper for a family of 3, and that was before considering overnight stops and fuel.

I think that because of that, coupled with our time restraints,flying is what we are now going to do. Hope we won't be missing anything along the way!! :-(

I have since started a new thread titled 'Florida Road Trip' for ideas.

Thanks.