Touring holiday to Nevada, California & Arizona

Now for Part 2, General Stuff about our holiday that may be useful for others.*** some of it will be fairly obvious to people who have travelled to Nevada, Arizona, California before, but I'll put it in anyway

Before you go. Research, Research & Research again and try and find 3 times as many things that you would like to do in each place, as well as giving yourself a list of places to visit/things to whilst your going from A-B-C. & then do more research and add more things.

The flight over to America.
If you have the option of a Direct flight, or if the Direct flight is only a wee bit dearer, consider doing so, as you will avoid any missed connection hassles. If your connection time looks at all 'iffy' create your own list of alternative flight options to present to the Customer Service people (we suggested a re routing via Dallas that meant an extra flight for us, but meant that we got into Las Vegas 4 hours earlier that the option that they were offering.

Car Hire
Petrol was up as far as $4.25/£2.14 per US gal, $5.10/£2.57 per UK gal for Unleaded and it was increasing everyday. To us, it was still great VFM, but it is still a lot more than it used to be - bear it in mind when you are costing the holiday up. As for the hire car itself, IMO, if you are going to be knocking up some miles, get a big car, a really big car. We initially got a Chrysler 300 Base (that was supposed to be a luxury car, but was a Premium car), it was large enough for a family of 4 with their holiday luggage, gave 30mpg and when on the flat or on a very gentle slope, went well enough. But if you needed to get on at all, the 2.7lt V6 engine and 4 speed gearbox made for tiresome progress. After 4 days the car developed a fault (or was it our imagination ?) and we swapped the car for a luxury class vehicle (by now I had rechecked the paperwork) and we got a Lincoln Towncar. 4.6lt V8, truly massive in every department, gave 25 mpg and was vastly suprerior to the Chrylser for our touring purposes (we did 600 miles in the 300 and it was ok -ish, we did over 2600 in the TownCar and it was very comfortable.
If you are considering a Convertible, think once, think twice, think three times and then think again. For an odd day, it would be fun. Travelling hour after hour in baking temperatures with the roof down would be (IMO) one step away from madness. Very few Americans hire convertibles - with good reason.
Picking up your hirecar from the hotel is a real winner.

Prices
Here's a shocker for you. America is no longer a cheap place to holiday, in fact in some circumstances, its quite expensive. Thankfully, with the £/$ rate being so good in our favour at the moment, we don't really see how expensive things are, but when the rate readjusts (as it surely will at some stage) be prepared for a nasty surprise.
Unless you are going to survive on fast food and promos like Subways 1 foot long sandwich for $5, you'll be eating out in restaurants and their prices have increased by 25-30% in some areas.
The US economy has really taken a hit and the price of fuel (in the US is has increased by over 100%) & credit crunch has had an enormous effect. The portion sizes however haven't reduced and TBH as a family, you could easily share 2 adult meals between 2 adults & 2 children, or 1 childs meal between 2 children if you wanted to.
You'll probably find the higher end food chains such as Outback a lot queiter than you expect.

more tomorrow.