Every trip starts at home and in the case of a long trip like ours, this meant some complications we had to consider.
Firstly, we were travelling from Gatwick Airport, which is great if you live in London, but not so convenient if you live in the North West of England. We decided to find somewhere to leave the car near the airport.
Car parking
There are a few options. First, you can leave the car at the airport parking. This is the most convenient when picking your car up on your return, it is also the most expensive. It would also mean finding somewhere to stay as our flight was leaving in the morning. After a lot of research we found a combined deal with both hotel and parking.
This is not easy of you are staying longer than 15 days, as many places including Premier Inn, have a time limit around this. We had also heard a few horror stories on UK television regarding an investigation into bad practice at these car parking companies, as well as a family member. To try to make sure we avoided these we used a few different review sites to evaluate them.
We read a lot of reviews and Skypark Secure also seemed to have a good reputation. Worth checking out the sites to see what they offer and find out more.
We flew from Gatwick though if you fly from Heathrow, they also have their own site you can check out prices on at Heathrow Airport Parking
Parking and Hotel Packages
APH was our eventual choice and the combined cost for 24 days parking and a hotel was around £150. Actually for parking alone it was working out to be £130+ so effectively the hotel was free of charge. You can check dates by clicking the widget over there too >>
We stayed at the Europa hotel. The rooms were definitely a bit tired, but as we arrived late and left very early, we weren’t really looking for luxury. There are different options with the APH parking deal so you could choose a more expensive preferred option, if you are staying for longer.
Despite the negative coverage of parking companies, we were really impressed with the service. The buses were fine, the drivers were helpful – loading and unloading all the passengers’ bags. This is also to improve turnaround times as no doubt leaving passengers to do this themselves would lead to faffing around and delays. When we got back to the car, it had less than a mile extra on the clock, so unless they are masters of digital milometer clocking it had only been moved round the site. No damage either.
I photographed the car before we left just to be sure, but everything was fine. The bus to the airport takes around 15 minutes.
There are some really useful companies that provide access to all of the above services and you can use them not only as a search tool but also to compare different offers. The biggest we found was Holiday Extras and they have everything from car parking to hotels and so on.
How to Get to the US to Canada
We were flying into Canada and then travelling into the US from there. This could have some advantages in terms of cost, where to fly from and so on. For the second time, we travelled with Canadian Affair and to their credit they are a great company to travel with.
If you are travelling to the US however, there are a variety of airlines you can travel with and the obvious carriers are either British Airways or Virgin Atlantic